


in search of a heartbeat

by andchaos



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, Here's The Long Full Story of Dennis Being a Homo That Nobody Asked For, M/M, Pre-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, canon-typical wildly running free mental illness and poor choices
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-04 08:39:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 58,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15837705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchaos/pseuds/andchaos
Summary: There were some things that Dennis had been wrestling with his whole life. Things that started out as idle questions when he was a teenager, things not at all helped by dating his best friends in everything but name for his entire adulthood. Sometimes he wondered if things ever got easier, or if you just got older and learned how to shoulder their weight.Mostly, Dennis learned to get really good at ignoring his feelings, even while he indulged them.





	1. the things we’re taking because we’re young and ashamed

**1990-2002**

 

Dennis was fourteen at the homecoming game. Dee dragged him along so that she could ogle at one of the football players she had a crush on, and Dennis had thought that it was a good opportunity to further sew himself into the fabric of the cool kids’ friend group. To get through this shitty high school abomination of a sports game, though, he was going to need to be high.

Tim had told him that under the bleachers was the place to score, so here Dennis was, peering around through the long shadows cast by the bright glare of the field lights and trying to decide where he was supposed to be looking. The only people around seemed to be couples making out, though. Dennis was just beginning to wonder whether or not he should break one of them up to see if maybe they were tag team drug dealers, but then he saw a couple scruffy boys sitting off to the side and fighting over what appeared to be a paper bag that they were bringing up to their faces and inhaling.

Yeah. That was definitely the place he was supposed to go.

Dennis ambled over and put his hands on his hips.

“What’s up,” he said. When they looked up, he realized that he recognized them. They were in a few of his classes. “I know you guys. Ronnie, right? And you’re Dirt Grub. Guys, two months into school and you already have nicknames – that’s so cool.”

“People don’t call me that,” the skinny one said.

“Clearly they do, because that’s how I know you.”

He glared up at Dennis. For a scrawny little freshman, he had one hell of an angry stare.

“No. My name’s Mac. This is Charlie,” he added, jerking his thumb over to Dirt Grub next to him. Charlie grinned up at him lazily and waved.

“Whatever. I’m Dennis Reynolds.” He folded himself down to the ground in front of them. “I hear you’re the guys to talk to if you’re looking to score.”

Mac and Charlie looked at each other, then back to Dennis. Charlie raised his eyebrows; Mac said, “You got cash?”

“Yeah. You got enough weed to make this fucking game any interesting?”

“Tell you what,” Mac said, his eyes raking over Dennis like he was checking him for a weapon or something, “I’ll cop you a discount. First time customers get five bucks knocked off so you can see if you like the product, ‘kay? Tell your friends.”

Dennis thought, Mac and Charlie just might be his ticket into the cool kids’ group after all.

 

Dennis lay on his back in Mac’s yard, smoking a spliff that Mac had rolled for them earlier and knocking back beers as they waited for the sun to set. Charlie had a joint to himself, his knees pulled to his chest. He was looking at Mac’s windows like he expected someone to come out and yell at them for doing drugs, but nobody was even home.

“He’s scared my dad’s going to swing by,” Mac murmured, leaning over to speak in Dennis’s ear. It didn’t matter, Charlie was probably so high that he wouldn’t notice if they yelled about him at full volume. “It’s his first day off probation.”

“So?” Dennis whispered back. “Why is he scared of your dad?”

“Because this is Luther’s weed, Dennis,” Charlie said sharply from his other side. “And I’m not _scared_. I’ve just heard rumors about him shanking people for a lot less.”

“Oh, that’s not a rumor,” Mac said. “That’s a fact. But who gives a shit, Charlie, I sling this shit around for him sometimes so he lets me partake. Relax. Have another beer.”

Charlie stared at the house for another few seconds before relenting and reaching out to accept the bottle from Mac. He relaxed a little, stretching his legs out and leaning his back against Mac’s shoulder. Mac grunted with the extra weight but didn’t say anything.

“What’s Sweet Dee up to?” Mac asked after a moment. Dennis gathered that he was talking to him and shifted to look at him. “Shouldn’t she be sniffing around somewhere, trying to get involved and shit?”

“She’s off trying to convince Rickety Cricket to mow the lawn or something,” said Dennis vaguely, tipping back more beer. “Mom said she’s got to do the outside chores for a month ‘cause she’s getting deathly pale or something.”

They picked apart Dee’s appearance for a couple of minutes, but it was no fun without her there to get upset and fight back. Charlie got up, muttering about getting more beers because the edge was wearing off, and he wandered back into the house with the lit joint tucked behind his ear. Dennis looked at Mac, and Mac looked at something over Dennis’s shoulder. His eyes were red and heavily lidded; this was not their first spliff today.

“What do you want to do tonight, man?” Dennis said at last. Mac didn’t answer at first, and Dennis flung his arm out to bat at his thigh. “Mac. Mac. Hey, Mac.”

Finally he looked over at him. “Huh?”

Dennis repeated the question. He explained, “I don’t want to spend another evening lying on your or Charlie’s basement floor. It’s Saturday. Why don’t we go to a party or something?”

“Because we weren’t invited to any, dude,” Mac said.

He took a long hit, so long that he started coughing hard as soon as he pulled it away from his mouth. Dennis sat up and started rubbing his back. Mac always, always forgot that he had put in tobacco and that it wasn’t a regular joint, and he always hit it too hard and had a sore throat for the rest of the night. Dennis passed him the beer he had been nursing to help soothe the ache.

“Thanks,” Mac gasped, coughing some more.

Charlie came back out, arms loaded with bottles. Dennis said nothing in return, just scooted back a little on the grass and folded his hands together in his lap. Mac was still chugging his beer, so Dennis cracked open a new one and clinked the neck of it together with Charlie’s.

When he had finished that bottle, Charlie laid down with his head in Mac’s lap. Dennis watched them shift to get comfortable again with the new position, an odd pang going through him as he did. It occurred to him, sometimes, that Mac and Charlie had known each other since they were kids. Mac and Charlie were each other’s best friends.

They would never say that, of course. Probably they didn’t even think that. But it bothered him, kind of, that they seemed to think that the other had something Dennis didn’t. He brushed it off, telling himself that it didn’t matter what that pair of shabby idiots thought – but Mac’s face scrunched up as he laughed at something Charlie said, and it mattered. It always fucking mattered.

Dennis spent the night lying in Mac’s basement while they all screamed at each other over a video game. Mac’s parents came home separately at a very late hour. Too drunk and high to hazard the walk home, Dennis laid down on Mac’s fold-out couch in the basement after Charlie had been picked up by his overprotective mother and got driven home.

Mac laid down next to him, saying he was too tired to walk upstairs and get properly ready for bed. He shuddered slightly when the front door closed and his second parent came inside – his mother and father started screaming at each other immediately. Dennis reached out to circle an arm around his waist and pulled Mac toward him. They went to sleep curled together, and in the morning they didn’t talk about it over the breakfast they bought before Mac insisted that he had to go to church.

It always fucking mattered.

 

Dennis started having sex sophomore year – there was that one time as a freshman, but it wasn’t a regular occurrence until he was older. Junior year, he went down on Chrissy Orlando on the trampoline. Senior year he asked a girl named Trish to the prom even though Mac, Charlie, and Dee all insisted that Trish was gross. He figured he could clean her up. He _knew_ she was easy, which was most of the appeal. The rest of the appeal was that nobody else would say yes to him.

“You’re going with _her_?” Tim Murphy asked him one day at lunch, when Dennis pointed her out. “Dude, she’s spent the last four years having a train run on her by every guy in school. They say that if she walks down the hallway, she’s guaranteed to run into at least two guys she’s slept with who have the same name.”

“I know what they say about her,” Dennis said testily. “I think she’s cool. You just don’t know her like I do.”

This was a lie; Dennis barely knew the girl at all. Tim muttered something about how maybe he was right and went back to his lunch. By the time the cafeteria emptied after that period, most of the school knew about Dennis taking Trashy Trish to the prom.

Chrissy Orlando stopped Dennis in the hall on the way back from trig. Mac was trailing alongside him, and he paused too, eying Chrissy up and down. She had become even more of a knockout since last year – gotten promoted to head cheerleader and started curling her pretty strawberry-blonde hair. She was still wearing those short, short skirts though.

“You’re going to the prom with Trish?” she asked.

“Yeah, what about it?” he said, a little defensively after getting nothing but shit for it all day. Then he smirked. “Oh, I get you. Did you want to go with me, Chrissy? Look, I know what we had was special –”

“What? No, I’m going with Adriano Calvaniste,” she said.

“Oh.” That stung just a little bit, although he kept his face carefully impassive. Mac grimaced out of consideration beside him; Adriano was so tan and athletic and cool. Dennis had already kind of hated him in sympathy on Dee’s behalf, since he had coined that awful nickname for her, but now he really, vehemently disliked him. Dennis didn’t like Dee, but that was his right as her brother. Adriano didn’t even know her, and if you were going to hate Dee, then it should be for the awful person that she was at heart. “Then why do you want to know?”

“I mean, I just thought I should warn you that she’s going to try and sleep with you,” Chrissy explained.

Dennis froze. Chrissy shifted her books to the other arm and looked at him curiously, her forehead kind of pinched together like she was waiting for a meltdown or something. Dennis frowned at her.

“So? That sounds awesome.” He watched her expression shift to something like sympathy.

“Dennis,” she said gently, reaching out to touch his arm. “You don’t have to keep sleeping with girls to keep up appearances. It’s okay.”

“Keep up – What are you talking about?”

This, finally, averted Mac’s eyes from Chrissy’s cleavage back to the side of Dennis’s face.

“Uh, Den,” he said awkwardly, already inching away to take flight, “this feels like a private –”

“Dennis, it’s okay,” Chrissy said urgently. She had dropped the volume of her voice, though, and she leaned toward him now like they were swapping state secrets. “Everyone kind of already knows that you’re gay.”

Mac stopped fidgeting and turned to stare openly at Dennis now. Dennis startled and turned pale.

“What?” he bit out. “I’m not gay, Chrissy. I – We slept together!”

She hushed him down, and he realized that he had started shouting. Chrissy grimaced.

“I know we did,” she hissed. “Be quiet.”

“Is he not good in bed?” Mac asked loudly. “Is that why you think so?”

For the first time, Chrissy glanced at Mac. She gave him a weird look for a split second before she turned back to Dennis.

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Dennis, I know it can be scary to come out or whatever –”

“I’m not scared,” Dennis said sharply. “I’m just not gay.”

Chrissy looked at him for a long time. Then she said, “Really?”

“Oh my god,” Dennis said, swiping his hand over his face. “Yes, really! I think I would know if I was gay.”

She just stared at him. Then her gaze shifted to back to Mac for a long moment, a strange expression on her face, before she said to Dennis, “Okay. Sorry then, I guess. I’m going to be late for sixth period.”

She excused herself and slipped around him, disappearing away down the hall. Mac pulled on Dennis’s arm until he started walking again; Dennis followed after him mechanically. His head felt entirely blank, his brain rusted to a stop.

Maybe Mac sensed that Dennis suddenly needed to skip health class. He dragged him over to his locker so he could grab some supplies from inside, pried Charlie out of the art room (which was his favorite class, but he was being extra nice this month because they had chosen him over Schmitty and pushed the guy out of a moving car for him) and failed to get Dee away from drama class, and the three of them headed down to the parking lot. The bleachers at the football field and the dumpster behind the gym would both have been too obvious and out in the open with classes still going on. They climbed into Mac’s dad’s Jeep and Mac started rolling them a blunt. What Dennis really wanted was a drink, but he had just gotten his fake ID confiscated last week, and his mother was home so he wouldn’t be able to raid the liquor cabinet yet. Instead he took the blunt Mac handed him and pulled on it hard.

“Did you guys know that everyone apparently thinks I’m gay?” he said once he had breathed out all the smoke.

Beside him, Mac cringed. That awful grimace was back on his face. Charlie just stared at him; evidently this was still news to some people. It hadn’t traveled all the way down the social ladder to Dirt Grub, at least, although that honestly didn’t mean shit.

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Dennis shouted, frustrated. Mac shushed him with a low warning that if he screamed like that they were going to get caught. Dennis felt really sick of being told to quiet down today. “Fuck you, Mac.”

“Who gives a shit?” Charlie said then. “So people think you’re gay, so what?”

“That’s a _sin_ , Charlie,” Mac said fretfully from the front.

Dennis rolled his eyes. “Oh, I don’t give a shit about any of that. It’s not that I think being gay is bad or whatever. I’m just _not_.”

Neither of his friends said anything. The conversation died off there, because Dennis’s head was basically just a repeat of the same complaint over and over and he didn’t want to bore them. The others seemed to have no more insight on the matter, which was maybe a blessing anyway. Probably it would have just been a twenty minute conversation where Dennis threw a fit about it and Mac gave one of his God sermons and Charlie kept asking what the big deal was.

He figured he would run the rumor by Dee later to see if she had any insight that wasn’t completely irritating. He had, to his displeasure, been hanging out with her a lot; she had been spending a lot more time with him and the guys in the past two years, in her latest desperate attempt to break free of the general social rung that she occupied along with Fatty Magoo and Rickety Cricket, and when Mac and Charlie were with their weird Freight Train buddies, it was often just him and her alone.

Mac turned on the radio and they passed the blunt around for ten minutes in silence. The next time someone spoke, it was just to ask if they wanted to go get McDonald’s.

They skipped the rest of the day.

 

In April, they all missed a tremendous amount of class in favor of sitting in the old stairwell near the library where nobody ever went, or else to hole up at somebody’s house and crush beer while they played video games for hours and hours. They hung around Dennis’s a lot, because Mac’s parents’ problems were getting worse and he didn’t like to be in the house. Charlie liked to escape the death-grip his mother kept on him whenever possible. Dennis didn’t like to hang around his house, avoided doing so alone whenever possible, but his mother had all but taken up residence at a new country club so it was usually at least empty. He strongly suspected that Mac and Charlie just liked being in a mansion, surrounded by pretty rich things, more than anything else.

They were all four of them watching Lethal Weapon, and when it ended Charlie said his goodbyes and went home; he had plans to do something weird by the junkyard tomorrow, and he didn’t want to stay up too late. Dennis honestly hadn’t wanted to know.

“Want to watch the sequel?” Dee asked mildly, turning to him and Dennis once Charlie had gone.

“Of course I do.”

Dennis looked at Mac. Mac was also supposed to go to the junkyard with Charlie, but evidently he didn’t mind doing it a little hungover and very tired, because he nodded as well.

They watched the second and put in the third. It was nearly one in the morning by then, but Dennis felt wide awake. He liked watching Mel Gibson shoot at people. He dressed cool and he undressed even better.

Dennis froze and shook away that line of thinking.

It was jarring – but it wasn’t the first time. Just like week, he and Mac had spent forty-five minutes dissecting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s workout routine, which mainly involved looking up shirtless pictures of him and trying to figure out which specific muscles he was working. At the time, it had seemed fine. At the time, Mac had been very convincing about how it would help them know which routines they should be doing at the gym.

But was it weird? Dennis wondered. Was it weird how much he had liked looking?

And there had been other times, a ton of other times. Him, Mac, and Charlie had spent every day of football season when they were sophomores up on the bleachers, watching the team train down below. They said they wanted to learn what they should be working on so that they could try out the next year, but then none of them ever had. When they were juniors, one of the lower classmen came out as gay, and everybody else tormented him for the rest of the year until he ended up transferring. Dennis had had at least three dreams before he moved away, all centered around what that kid did when he was alone with other guys. He had chalked it up to a morbid fascination with the unknown, a belief reinforced by Mac confirming that he had experienced something very similar when his old youth pastor brought up his boyfriend during one sermon (Mac never went back to the same group after that).

Dennis turned to look at Mac now, face lit by the dim shine of the TV and nothing more. He was lounging, legs spread, shouting dumb shit about the movie with Dee. Maybe some of Dennis’s beliefs about what was and wasn’t gay weren’t totally reliable, coming from Mac.

Or maybe, a small voice in the back of his head argued, he should start taking responsibility for his own feelings.

The thought shook him, and he sat up straighter suddenly. Mac glanced at him.

“You okay, dude?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Dennis said quickly. Dee shushed the both of them and Mac went back to watching the movie.

 _Did_ he like boys, he wondered? It wasn’t something he had ever actually considered. Sure, he had slept with a heavy handful of girls, but hadn’t some of those very same girls asked him _themselves_ if he wasn’t more interested in going down on other boys than he was in going down on them? It was the first time that Dennis thought about Chrissy Orlando and his head started pounding in a bad way.

He was very far down a road of bad thoughts, but he couldn’t exactly remember how he had gotten here in the first place. It was what he imagined it might be like being thrown out into a deep pit and knowing that there was no getting out, so you might as well start making a home for yourself down there as soon as possible.

Dennis looked over at Mac again, where he was laughing at the movie and making fake gun sounds whenever someone shot a bullet. Maybe it didn’t matter if Dennis was alone in this or not, he thought, letting out a little sigh. It would be nice not to be, but between Mac’s tendency to bring up his conservative religious beliefs and his long history of hating introspection, whether or not he was gay too would hardly be the problem. There was no scenario on earth that would make Mac come out of the closet, even if he _was_ like Dennis.

Dennis nestled back into the couch and unscrewed another beer.

 

Mac and Charlie were wrestling in the grass behind a Chik-fil-A. Dennis and Dee were finishing their lunches and watching them. It was the first really warm day of the season, and they were happily lounging with their sweatshirts tied around their waists and the year’s first pair of shorts.

Charlie pinned Mac down and knelt up, cheering. Mac socked him in the gut and he fell to the side, groaning.

“I already won, you demented asshole! That’s cheating!” Charlie protested between wheezes, while Dee booed.

“It is not!” Mac yelled, rolling up to his feet. “Dennis?”

He approached the picnic table where the twins were perched and held out his hand. Dennis passed him his fork so that he could take a bite of Dennis’s lunch.

“I say it’s fair,” Dennis said. “You fight with Mac, you take responsibility for the chance that you get punched.”

“Thank you, Dennis,” Mac said, beaming at him.

“That’s not fair,” Charlie said. “Dennis always sides with Mac.”

Dee glanced between them.

“I don’t know,” she said, “at first I thought you were right, Charlie, but I kind of agree with Dennis. It’s like when you bite us. If you fight with Charlie, there’s a chance you get bitten – if you fight with Mac, you might get hit. It’s fair game.”

“I – well, that’s true,” Charlie said, grimacing. He threw himself back down on the grass. “I don’t like it, though.”

“Tough luck, buddy,” Mac said, passing Dennis back his food and joining him down on the ground. He squinted up at Dennis, the sun in his eyes. “Come sit, bro, it’s way nicer down here.”

“It’s dirty down there,” Dennis said witheringly. Mac had barely left him anything in his container; he always was good at wolfing down a ton of food in the span of a few seconds. He stabbed his fork through the last of it and tossed the container to the side to deal with later.

Mac rolled his eyes and threw himself flat out on his back, eyes tipping closed against the sun. After a moment, he seemed to feel that this wasn’t good enough, because he slung an arm across his face too.

“It’s hot as fuck,” Dee complained. “This sun is making the metal on my brace get so hot that it’s starting to burn me when I touch it.”

“I want to go swimming,” Charlie said.

“I’m not going to a public pool,” Dennis said. He tilted his face toward the sun and closed his eyes. He needed to start working on his base for the summer. “I’d rather get stampeded.”

“It’s _like_ getting stampeded,” Dee snorted. “All those fucking little kids running all over you.”

Dennis laughed.

“We could go blast each other with water guns,” Mac said. “I think I have a few somewhere in my basement from when I was a kid.”

The others all looked at each other for a long minute, debating. It’s true that it sounded a little childish, but nobody else was saying anything against it. None of them wanted to be the first –or even worse, the lone – dissenter.

“Well, shit,” Dennis said at last, getting up from the picnic table with a sigh. “If no one’s got any better ideas, let’s go blast each other.”

Mrs Mac grunted at them as they all piled in the door twenty minutes later.

“Don’t any of you have your own homes?” she asked witheringly.

It was a baseless complaint, because they had spent half the week at the Reynolds’s and the other half at Charlie’s, because Dennis and Dee usually had ice cream and Charlie had had a blow-up pool before Mac accidentally put his switchblade through it. Mac, ever the dutiful son regardless of how his parents treated him, shot her an apologetic look anyway. The others avoided eye contact and followed him down into the basement.

As Mac bent to dig through the pile of boxes shoved up against one wall, Dennis fell back on the couch with the others. It was a tight squeeze; he threw his arm around Charlie’s shoulders so he could press closer and make more room for the contraption swallowing Dee.

“Ow, Dee! That thing is burning me!” Charlie complained, pressing closer to Dennis on the couch.

“I told you assholes,” Dee said, glaring at the both of them. “You never listen to me.”

“I didn’t even say anything,” Dennis protested.

“Got ‘em!” Mac shouted a moment later. He was ducked behind some boxes, but his lone arm shot up into the air, waving around a Super Soaker.

They threw three water guns together on the floor, and when Mac unearthed the fourth and last, they grabbed them all up and headed back up the stairs to get changed. None of them wanted to borrow Mac’s (ratty, tiny) swim trunks so they stripped off their t-shirts instead and went out in just their shorts. Dee refused and took one of Mac’s old shirts to wear over her underwear instead. They stole beer from the fridge while Mrs Mac wasn’t looking, and piled out the back door together.

It was hot, hotter than he remembered even though it had only been twenty or so minutes that they were inside. Charlie crouched to get the hose running, and Mac went to work filling up the guns. He tossed one to Dennis, who in turn spun around toward Dee and blasted her with it.

“Dennis!” she shrieked, trying and failing to jump out of the way of his stream. “Dennis, that’s fucking cold! You’re cheating, I don’t even have a gun yet!”

Dennis just laughed.

“It’s supposed to be cold, Dee,” Charlie said, trotting over to the gun stockpile, picking one up, and shooting it at her too. She yelped some more; Charlie and Dennis high-fived.

“Go wild,” Mac said, throwing her a gun.

Dee pumped it and shot it directly into Dennis’s face.

“Holy _shit_!” He scrambled to wipe the water out of his eyes. While he was dancing around blind, Dee aimed her next hit directly at his junk. “Oh, you goddamn bitch! That is ice water!”

“That’s what you wanted, right? Bet you’re cooled off now,” Mac said, laughing meanly.

All three of them turned their guns on him instead. Mac turned to run and immediately slipped, and he fell face-first into the grass. He shouted obscenities while the others loomed over him, blasting him relentlessly until Dee seemed to get bored of assaulting an unarmed man and turned her gun back on her brother.

“Fuck you! We’re not doing each other, we’re ganging up on Mac!”

Dee shrugged. Dennis aimed at her, and in solidarity, Charlie did too. Mac finally managed to turn over and get his feet under him. His white shorts were covered in grass stains and sticking to his thighs and ass; the outline of his underwear was suddenly very obvious under the soaked, and therefore see-through, cotton.

“Shit, you guys,” he said.

Dennis – didn’t stare. He _looked_ , okay, and there was a difference. He _noticed_ , but just that there was something to notice in the first place. The underwear was thin and small and very, very tight. Or maybe it was just because of everything that was packed inside it. After a quick moment, he skated his gaze to the side and exchanged looks with Charlie. Dee coughed.

“Is that how you dress in polite company?” Dee asked at last, and they all broke down laughing – except Mac, who flushed a deep red and turned his back on them. This, however, only revealed his ass – which was possibly even more exposed than his junk through those soaked wet pants.

“Shut the fuck up!” Mac snapped, and he fled back into the house.

Charlie rolled his eyes. He dug around in the cooler and uncapped a beer with his back teeth, passing it into Dennis’s outstretched hand. Then he took one for himself, swigging half of it back in one go. He hefted his gun up over his shoulder, aiming it in the general direction of the twins and waving it around but not shooting. Dennis fluttered an irritated hand in front of his face.

“Give me a second,” he said, throwing his gun down to the grass. “I gotta take a piss.”

Charlie and Dee shot little squirts of water at his back as he retreated after Mac into the house.

He passed Mac in the hallway on his way back down the stairs. He was in a new pair of shorts, black this time, but still shirtless. Dennis flicked his eyes over him for a second, then smirked. He brought his beer back up to his mouth.

“Dude, the sun is going to bake you to shit in that. Black?” Dennis snorted.

Mac shoved him so hard he nearly toppled headfirst down the staircase. Dennis grabbed his arm to steady himself, fingers digging into his bicep. Mac tugged him backwards to safety, but he overcompensated in the other direction and Dennis ended up propelled into the railing. Dennis rolled his eyes and followed him back down the stairs.

Mac had gotten tanner since the summer started, shoulders blades sharp, back muscles somehow both soft as well as strong, stretching out smoothly under his skin. Sturdy. He was sturdy. Dennis’s gaze flicked over the freckles dotting his shoulders and settled near one of his biceps. Mac had been talking about getting a tattoo there, had even shown Dennis a rough sketch of what he wanted. Dennis thought he might like it, deep black ink seeped under his friend’s skin.

They went back out to rejoin the others. Charlie greeted them by dumping an entire beer over Mac’s head – or as much as he could before Mac yelped and danced out of the way, and then he downed the rest.

“What is taking you bitches so long?” Dee called. “I’m drying up over here!”

“It’s no fun if you ask for it,” Dennis said.

Regardless, the boys dutifully turned and blasted her with ice water until she was shrieking again. They ran around the yard yelling and attacking each other until they collapsed, polished off the beer, and started fighting over what they should rent from Blockbuster tonight.

They managed to come to a conclusion after only an hour of fighting, an arbitration process undoubtedly sped along by the furious heat of the sun shining over them. At last, Dee and Charlie took the car to go find something for them all to eat tonight and Dennis followed Mac back inside to change before heading down the street to the video place. They had ultimately agreed that it was Charlie’s night to pick and they couldn’t veto him even though he wanted to watch some dumb wrestling flick that nobody else cared about. If they started throwing vetoes into the delicate balance of movie night, hell would break loose even more often than it did now.

Dennis pawed through Mac’s drawers while he headed off to take a shower. He stripped out of his wet clothes, flinging them over the edge of the windowsill to dry off, and then pulled on a pair of Mac’s many basketball shorts and a t-shirt from Aspen that looked suspiciously like one Dennis had lost a while ago. Rolling his eyes, he threw himself onto Mac’s bed and started flipping through one of the bodybuilder mags he had stacked on his dresser. Mac was always _talking_ about getting strapped, but in Dennis’s private opinion, that was never going to happen if he spent twice as long flipping through these magazines as he did actually working out.

Mac strolled back in while Dennis was lingering over a picture of Kevin Levrone.

“Hey, bro,” Mac said. “I was thinking – we could totally go over Charlie’s head and grab whatever movie we wanted from the store. They should have known better than to send both of us, it’s not even our fault.”

“What?”

Dennis dragged his attention away from the magazine, which turned out to be a mistake. Mac had dropped his towel with apparently no regard for who was in the room with him. Dennis got a good look at his ass for nearly five full seconds before he flung the magazine up to cover his eyes.

“Dude!” he shrieked. “Put your fucking junk away!”

“Don’t be a pussy,” Mac said, throwing a withering look over his shoulder. Dennis only caught it because he’d peeked out from under the magazine to see if he had covered up yet. He hadn’t, and Dennis quickly dove back for cover. “We’ve changed for gym class together like, every day for four years.”

“I’m never at this angle! Holy shit, I just saw taint.”

“Sorry to tease you with what you can’t have,” Mac said.

He finally tugged on a pair of gym shorts. Dennis rolled his eyes, now free from cover, and pulled the pillow out from underneath his head so he could whip it across the room at him. Mac laughed and swatted it out of the way. It clattered against a stack of CDs in the corner, sending them all flying.

“Shit,” Mac muttered, but he didn’t move to clean it up. “Whatever, I’ll get it later.”

He launched himself onto the bed next to Dennis, grinning over at him when it made the mattress jump and quake. Dennis shoved him until he was squished closer to the wall. Mac grabbed his wrists and pulled his arms away.

“Get off me,” he grumbled.

There was a brief tussle. Dennis ended up on top and he dug his nails into Mac’s pinned wrists so hard that Mac let out a small, pained sound.

There was a collection of seconds, right then, that felt like they were each wrapped up in the own private eternities. Mac swallowed. Mac was pressed into the bed. Dennis’s breathing stuttered, as did his heart. He thought he could feel every single inch of the foot between their faces.

He glanced down at Mac’s mouth for a split second, and then he pulled away completely. He sat back against the wall that the bed was shoved up against, and he pulled his knees close to his chest. Mac pushed himself up as well, rubbing his wrists. He peered down at them.

“Look what you did,” he said sulkily, holding his arms out.

Mac’s skin had crescents dug in where Dennis’s nails had been. Dennis looked at the tiny blue half-moons and the red skin around them, just for a second before snorting and looking away.

“Whatever. You were being a punk.”

“Punk is cool,” Mac insisted, drawing his hands back into his lap.

Dennis rolled his eyes. After a moment, he nudged Mac off the bed, saying, “Can you finish getting dressed? If Dee and Charlie get back before we do, they’re just gonna put in Silence of the Lambs again.”

“Serial killer movies are good,” Mac commented. He did, however, climb off the bed and go back to his dresser to rummage for a t-shirt.

“Yeah, but we’ve seen that a hundred times already because it’s the only half-decent movie you own.”

Mac whirled around to fix him with a hard, serious stare.

“Don’t you _dare_ throw Rambo under the bus like that,” he threatened, index finger drawn and pointed right at Dennis’s heart.

Dennis tipped his head to the side for a moment, considering.

“You know what, you’re right,” he said solemnly. Rambo deserved respect. “I’m sorry.”

Dee and Charlie beat them back to the house a little over an hour later, but only by a few minutes. They were indeed pulling Silence of the Lambs down from the shelf when Mac and Dennis walked in, and the silent stand-off that then began in Mac’s living room lasted ten long seconds before Charlie let out a shriek and dove for the VCR, and Dennis launched across the room and grabbed him around the middle, tackling him clean to the floor.

Dee brought them ice for their rug burn while Mac fast-forwarded to the opening credits. Glaring at Charlie, Dennis retreated sulkily to the couch where Mac was sitting and dropped down next to him, putting two bodies between him and the reason for his scraped cheek. Mac grumbled but made room for him anyway.

Mrs Mac had a friend stay over that night – much to Dennis’s surprise, a feeling only increased by the fact that he never saw the two women do more than chain smoke and watch TV side by side, never even exchanging a word – so the pullout couch was taken from him and he bundled up with Mac in his bedroom.

Dennis lay awake for an hour or so in the dark, listening to Mac’s steady breathing. He thought he was asleep until he felt the bed shift beside him, and Mac’s voice whispered to him through the dark.

“Dennis? Are you still awake?”

Dennis shifted onto his side to see Mac watching him, glassy eyes reflective in the bare moonlight streaming into the room.

“What’s up, bro?”

Mac didn’t answer at first. Annoyance flickered up in him, but instead of lashing out, Dennis shifted closer until their noses were almost touching. He thought – for just a second – that he felt Mac’s hand brush his hair, but then it was gone and he was sure that he had imagined it.

“What date does Penn start school?” he asked at last.

Dennis’s mind reeled and tried to settle down on this conversation, but he had trouble getting a firm grasp on it. It was a topic so out of left-field, wildly apart from any subject that had been broached today – or even this week at all. Actually, Mac generally refused to participate in any conversation that centered around Dennis going away to college in the fall.

Mechanically, he told him the date. Ever since he had gotten the acceptance letter last week, that day had been lasered in his brain, written in bold and circled three times on his calendar. The day he finally got to get the fuck away from where he grew up and spent all of his time. He would still be in Philly, sure, but at least he could spend his days frequenting new coffee shops and different bars.

Mac didn’t elaborate on why he’d begun the conversation. Dennis was mostly just relieved to have gotten so much as an acknowledgement about the whole thing out of the guy, and he didn’t ask why he wanted to know. Some part of his brain where he stored shit he didn’t want to think about suggested he might know why Mac had brought it up, anyway.

Mac closed his eyes again, turning away onto his other side. Dennis hesitated, hand shaking, for a long moment before he reached out. His palm landed on Mac’s side, and when he didn’t move, Dennis carefully wound his arm around Mac’s waist. He held his breath, waiting for Mac to shift out from under him, or maybe to turn around and ask what the fuck he was doing.

But Mac did nothing for a couple of seconds. And then he shifted backwards, just barely, into the embrace. Dennis breathed out and pulled Mac tight against his chest. Mac was warm, those same sturdy muscles Dennis had admired earlier firm but satisfying to touch. There was just the right amount of meat to him. Dennis’s heart slowed and calmed.

They fell asleep like that, entwined. Not even for a second did Dennis harbor any delusions about bringing it up or repeating it.

He dreamed that they were locked in a metal container together, no bigger than the size of Mac’s closet. Despite the direness of their situation, they were both calm. Dream-Mac, so unlike his own, smirked confidently at him as he backed Dennis up against one wall and kissed him deftly. Dream-Mac tasted like candy canes and smelled like Real-Mac’s cologne, and Dennis went boneless in his arms as Mac kissed him and kissed him until they were both loose and pliant, falling into each other. His tongue was more skilled than it probably was in real life, and he was definitely stronger; he lifted Dennis up to press him into the wall with ease, and he had no trouble keeping them both upright as they kissed and kissed and kissed.

Dennis got on his knees and sucked Dream-Mac off in the middle of the floor. He had never actually sucked a dick before, but details like that were hardly important in dreams; his mind kept the finer details like taste vague and focused on the things Dennis _did_ know from the blowjobs he had gotten himself.

Dream-Mac sighed his name exactly the way Real-Mac sometimes said it, when he was especially drunk or especially petulant about something petty Dennis had done. Dream-Mac hauled Dennis into his lap and whispered things both sexy and soft into his ear while he jerked him off. Dennis pressed his open mouth against his neck when he came.

Dennis awoke sitting bolt-upright in Mac’s lightening bedroom, covered in a sheen of sweat and panting hard. The clock read 6:14a.m.

Dennis looked over at Mac, his flesh and blood Real-Mac, fast asleep on his side of the bed. He had kicked most of the covers down by his waist in the night, and his mouth hung open as he snored unpleasantly. As though sensing Dennis’s gaze in his sleep, he turned his face away where he lay on his stomach. Dennis sighed.

In an hour, Mac would wake up and make breakfast while they got ready for school. In an hour, Dennis would pretend to have been sleeping soundly the entire night.

 

As May progressed, Dennis felt that he should test out this theory of his, this big question mark that had taken over his life. He thought about it more and more often now, and he figured he should find out if liking guys was going to be a real issue for him or if, when he got down to business, he would find out that he didn’t really care for it after all. Kissing Mac had been fun in dreams, but maybe that was just another trick of dream-logic that would never hold up in real life.

Dennis went to a party with just Dee while the others were busy with their Freight Train friends. Dennis brought weed swiped from Mac’s room and got very, very drunk and then really, really stoned with Tim Murphy in his parents’ bathroom.  Dennis and his friend only kissed once as they jerked each other off. Mostly they sighed against each other’s shoulders, and their sounds were almost entirely muffled by the raging party outside the door.

Dennis went home unsatisfied by how very, very satisfied he felt. He dropped Dee off and then drove straight to Mac’s place, where he surprised him by crawling in through his window and curling up on his sheets.

Mac came home an hour after he got there, and Dennis hadn’t moved, but he hadn’t fallen asleep.

“Holy shit, dude, you scared the crap out of me,” Mac said. He dropped his backpack to the floor and flicked on the light. For a second, he just peered at Dennis in a ball on his bed, brow furrowed. “Are you okay? How was the party?”

Dennis hadn’t spoken in two hours, not even when he dragged Dee home early. His voice took a long while to climb out of his throat.

“It was lame,” he managed. He wasn’t quite looking at Mac so much as he was staring over his shoulder at his desk.

“Really? Because Dooley got a call from some chick who was over there, said the place was insane.”

“Me and Tim Murphy got in a fight,” Dennis lied. Maybe some shred of good could still be salvaged, if the gang thought that Tim was going to be off-limits in solidarity with Dennis’s imagined grudge. Nobody ever had to find out what he’d done. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay…” Mac said slowly.

He seemed poised to ask another question, but Dennis closed his eyes and pulled the sheets up over himself and nestled into his pillows. Mac evidently decided against prompting him for more; he rustled around a bit after that, presumably changing into pajamas, and then he flicked off the light and climbed over Dennis into bed. Dennis made sure they kept on opposite sides of the mattress, and he hoped that for once his dreams were normal.

 

Senior Prom came on the second Friday in June. Most of the seniors all got a half day so they could go home early and start getting ready, but instead the gang piled into Dennis’s car and went to grab a pizza and smoke up on the way.

Dee refused to eat much, insisting she needed to look pretty for her dress. She flipped them off, looking genuinely hurt, when they insisted that she would never look pretty no matter how little she ate and how much makeup she wore.

Charlie and Mac had no dates – everyone had turned them down – so they were going stag with each other. Dee got berated by their mother about her weight and back brace so much that she broke down in tears and locked herself in the bathroom instead, insisting that she wasn’t going after all. No one tried to make her.

Mac disappeared almost immediately when they got to the venue, off to the bathroom to polish off his flask that he hadn’t managed to suck down before they came inside. Dennis’s date was nowhere to be found. He got progressively angrier the longer Trish was gone, and when she came back fifteen minutes later she was sporting a big hickey on her neck and her bra was unhooked, clearly visible through the backless area of her dress. He screamed at her for about ten seconds before she just wandered away, looking bored.

“God _damn_ it.” Dennis slammed his fist down on the table they were at just as Mac reappeared; Mac jumped back, looking startled.

“Bro, what’s up?”

“Some _asshole_ just fucking banged my prom date, that’s what happened. If I ever find out who did it –!”

“Oh, Trashy Trish?” asked Mac. “I just saw her getting out of Tim Murphy’s car like, ten minutes ago.”

Dennis’s heart dropped to the floor. In a low voice, he said, “Are you serious?”

Maybe Tim hadn’t taken the excuses of being drunk and high very well, those fucking _ready-made_ excuses, and now he was blaming Dennis for what happened or something. Maybe he was just scared of his own sexuality. Maybe he was just a jerk.

“This place sucks,” Mac complained. “Who wants to go home and do some of my dad’s blow?”

“I do,” Dennis said immediately. He probably didn’t need his heart rate to climb any higher but he did need to not be sober.

He stood up and they both looked over at Charlie, who hadn’t moved from the table. He was watching everyone else dancing, but after a moment he noticed their eyes on him and looked up, startled.

“What, me? Oh, I’m not leaving.”

“What?”

“I spiked the punch,” Charlie said, idly turning his gaze back to the rest of their class. “I’m gonna stick around and see how that plays out.”

“Goddamn it,” Dennis muttered again. “Okay, whatever. Mac, let’s go grab your coke and head back to my place. I’m sure Sweet Dee is cooking up one hell of a pity party over there.”

They spent the night wasting their blow on a marathon of Fraggle Rock. Around midnight, one of them suggested that they at least steal a stop sign to make the night more interesting, considering it was supposed to be the most special night of their lives or whatever. They were not subtle about it and even though Dennis hung it over his bed, he fell asleep later (drunk from what they had fished from his parents’ stash and with Mac in the guest room  next door) feeling like the whole night – maybe even the whole of senior year – had been one big goddamn waste.

 

Did Mac know how frustrating he was being? Dennis wondered sometimes. Was it on purpose that he had his arm thrown out across the back of the couch, maybe-inadvertently around Dennis’s shoulders, or the way he brushed Dennis’s thigh when he pushed himself up to get more beer? Did he know that he was spiking Dennis’s blood hot when he asked to shotgun weed, or was it just another unfortunate fact of his life that such things happened when Mac was just being himself?

If Dennis had to choose a guy for his sexual identity conversation – he wouldn’t call it a _crisis_ , because he refused to say he was stressed. It was just something that he talked over with himself with increasing regularity – to center around, he wouldn’t have picked his best friend. Mac was so far down the list of boys Dennis would have picked that he didn’t even land in top thousand. Dennis wished he would have more dreams about Dion Lambert instead; a cornerback for the Patriots, at least, he wouldn’t have to worry about looking in the eye the next morning. Especially on the occasions that they fell asleep in the same goddamn bed.

As the school year wound down, they had to start going back to class just to finish final exams. Every day, it seemed, they collapsed after school in somebody’s living room. Every day they watched another bad movie and Mac’s hand ended up too close to Dennis’s thigh or wound too tight around his shoulders. Every day there was another small thing said – a casual _baby_ thrown into conversation, a slight wink as he joked about sex – that made Dennis’s stomach catch on fire and which Mac, it seemed, never even noticed.

Dennis started marking down the days left until the autumn on the calendar hung over his desk. He couldn’t wait to go off to college and forget that senior year – that the last four years, really – had ever even happened.

 

On the last day of high school, Charlie finally lost his virginity to one of the many, many girls that Mac and Dennis had tried to push on him over the years. Stacy Corvelli was a slut and she took the six-pack they bribed her with to go on a date, and the next day Charlie confided that he had closed the deal. They all high-fived over breakfast at one of the diners between their houses, where they were sitting outside chugging bottomless mimosas and nearly-black coffee.

“How was it, dude, how was it?” Mac asked, leaning over the table eagerly like he thought he might miss crucial details if he didn’t pay attention to every single word.

“Pfft, it was awesome,” Charlie said. “She was like, totally screaming my name or whatever.”

“She gives it away so often, I’m surprised there’s any sensation left down there at all.” Dennis laughed, clapping Charlie on the back. His hand lingered, just for a second. “Good job, buddy.”

Charlie grinned. “Thanks.”

But later, after Mac had gone home to help his mom with some redecorating (or so he claimed – Dennis felt that it was much more likely she was making him crawl around in the gutter or something), Charlie and Dennis rolled a joint with some weed Mac had left in a grinder in Dennis’s room. Barbara would have his ass if he got caught smoking on the property – she said it made people’s teeth yellow and caused their skin to sag, and she would never let Dennis get that ugly – so they crawled out of the downstairs window and snuck across the lawn. They didn’t light up until they were halfway between Dennis’s house and the playground half a mile down the road.

“Dude, I could fall in love with Mac if he always let me smoke his weed for free,” Dennis sighed, breathing out his latest puff toward the starry sky. “This shit is _top shelf_.”

“You sound like a dumbass. Weed can’t be top shelf.”

Dennis glared at him, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Shut up, dude. Are you saying you wouldn’t suck his dick for free access to this shit for life?”

“Why are we talking about sucking Mac’s dick?” Charlie said, shaking his head. “Man, fuck off. I’m trying to enjoy this high.”

Dennis looked curiously to the side at him. Charlie’s face was stone, his forehead drawn with angry lines.

“What’s up, Charlie? You look like you’re thinking really hard about something.” Dennis snorted. “Or trying to.”

“Shut up,” Charlie snapped. He stripped off his jacket and leaned up to drape it over the top of the fence separating the park from the road. They climbed and scrambled over it, and only once they were successfully on the other side and Charlie was tugging his jacket back on did he say, “I’m thinking about Stacy Corvelli.”

He kind of mumbled it; Dennis turned it over for a moment in his head, trying to piece together what he’d said, before it clicked.

“Why?” he said baldly. “Oh man, don’t tell me she has you pussy-whipped and you think you’re in love with her now or some shit? Bro, all she did was fuck you for like, twenty minutes. If you go panting after her now –”

“It’s not that,” Charlie interrupted. He looked more pissed off than ever.

“Then what? Did you sprain something?” He paused. “Did _she_?”

“No, I didn’t – What?”

Dennis held up his hands. “Don’t give me that look! It can happen.”

“ _How_?” Charlie said. Then he shook his head rapidly and added, “No, forget it. I don’t care.”

“It’s not that weird,” Dennis insisted. “She was a gymnast, and she bent at this weird angle –”

“Dennis, she didn’t hurt herself! I don’t think she ever got into it enough to sprain something.”

“I’m just say – What?” Dennis stared. Charlie, apparently regretting that moment of honesty, crossed his arms tight and glared at the ground. Dennis took another hit off the joint, and now his head was light and airy, spinning softly around. “I thought you said she screamed herself hoarse and you made her cum like, three or four times.”

“I lied,” Charlie said shortly. “Okay? I lied!”

Dennis watched him guardedly. After a moment’s hesitation, wondering if it was too risky to give voice to this particular question and deciding to go for it anyway, Dennis said, “About the whole thing, or –?”

They had reached the swings. Charlie threw himself down onto one and reached out for the smoke. He swayed gently side to side, taking puffs, and for once Dennis didn’t hound him about hogging it.

“I really did bang her, if that’s what you mean,” Charlie said wearily. “I’m just not sure that she enjoyed it very much.”

“What do you mean, like she didn’t cum or something?” Dennis asked, genuinely curious.

“I don’t know. I think she did,” Charlie said. “She just didn’t seem that…enthusiastic, during it. She just kind of lay there, and after a while she got real quiet and she made this little sound…and then she just told me to get off her and she got dressed and left.”

“Oh,” Dennis said, processing this new information. At length, he said, “Well, that’s no big deal, Charlie. Every single time can’t be the best you’ve ever had, and Stacy’s had a _lot_ of times, if you know what I mean.”

Charlie didn’t look like this made him feel better at all. Instead he screwed up his mouth, going silent. Dennis told himself he would ask what was the matter after he took this hit – after he recovered from coughing – after he took one more…

“I just don’t want her to tell everyone that I sucked and that I’m, like, no good in bed or something.”

“She might say that,” Dennis said, laughing a little. Some poor freshman had gone to bed with her last year, and everyone still called him _Three Inches_ , even now. The memory was too fresh to deny. Dennis said, “But who cares?”

“I do!” Charlie said, looking miserable. “Dennis, man. I don’t even know how to _kiss_.”

“What? What does that mean?” Dennis asked. “There’s nothing to learn. It’s just something you do.”

“Well, I suck at it,” said Charlie, lower lip jutting out unhappily. He looked very young and pathetic. “God, and now everyone’s going to find out and no one is ever going to want to go out with me ever again. I’m not leaving like you, dude, I’m stuck here with the same people who’ll hear the rumors.”

“So just learn how to kiss so no one can say that about you. If it’s not true, the rumors will die down eventually.” He shrugged one shoulder. “It just takes practice, that’s all.”

“It took me sixteen years to get my first kiss, and another two to get my second. Nobody’s going to want to practice with a kid like me.”

Dennis dug his heels into the sand and woodchips, stopping the swing. He shifted toward his friend. Charlie wasn’t looking at him, instead watching the dirt at their feet and pouting. Dennis took a deep breath.

“Charlie, I’m going to say something now and I want you to know that I’m just doing it because I’m a good friend. I don’t mean anything by it, and I’m offering as a _favor_ to you.”

Charlie looked up at him. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s only one person who has more or less banged every person in school _and_ who won’t judge you no matter what. I mean, okay, maybe they’ll judge you. But they wouldn’t ever _tell_ anyone.”

Charlie frowned. “Who?”

Dennis rolled his eyes.

“Are you serious?” he scoffed. “I’m talking about me, you son of a bitch.”

Charlie’s eyes went wide.

“But – but –”

“Look,” Dennis said, waving him off in irritation. “I know how to kiss and I can teach you. I’ve done it before. And there’s nobody else who’s going to do that who you know won’t spread it around after.”

Charlie’s brow furrowed. He asked, “How do I _know_ you won’t tell?”

It was a fair question. Dennis was sure that he wasn’t the only one who was remembering watching Charlie eat a worm, only to have the entire school laughing at him by lunch. Dennis sighed a little, then gave him a bracing smile. He reached out, his hand falling on Charlie’s shoulder, and he shook him a little.

“Because, dude, that would expose me too. Nobody would give a shit why we were doing it. They would just think that we were gay together…and shit.”

“Oh,” Charlie said.

His expression was still cloudy, but Dennis could see that this argument had swayed him somewhat. It was the truth, after all; Dennis would never risk something like that getting out, and Charlie knew it. He sucked on the last of the joint, waiting for an answer.

“Well?” he asked impatiently after a moment. He stubbed the roach out under his shoe. “What do you say? Want me to be your third?”

Charlie hesitated a moment, and then he said, “Okay.”

Dennis’s brows raised. “Okay?”

“Don’t look so scared,” Charlie said, some of the venom from earlier returning to his voice like he thought Dennis had tricked him somehow. “It was your idea!”

“I know,” Dennis said. The hand on Charlie’s shoulder squeezed down reassuringly. “I know, man. Just calm down.”

He waited a moment, listening to Charlie’s aggravated breathing begin to steady and even out.

“Okay,” Charlie said, and he raised his eyes to meet Dennis’s own. They shared a little nod.

Dennis swayed his swing closer. Charlie closed his eyes. In the moment before he closed the distance between them, a fleeting thought came to him, borne no doubt from the smoke and his lack of sleep: He couldn’t believe that eighteen, the year that he was supposed to be starting college, a year he had always envisioned as full of big-breasted co-eds taking off their tops and slipping with him into bed – he couldn’t believe that this year he had spent more time thinking about kissing his own best friends than he had spent actually kissing any woman yet.

His mouth found Charlie’s anyway. Charlie’s lips were soft, albeit chapped as all hell. If nothing else, this experiment would at least give him some of the cherry lipbalm Dennis was wearing, which might hopefully introduce him into the world of cheap cosmetics.

After a moment, perhaps after the initial shock had died down, Charlie began to kiss him back. It was gentle, and Dennis slid his hand up Charlie’s shoulder until it curled around the side of his neck. His fingers found a strand of hair near the top of his spine and twisted it loosely around.

The kissing itself was nothing too shocking or strange. Their lips moved together, again and again. Any time Charlie seemed like he was getting too in his head, thinking too much, his rhythm grew off and Dennis would coax him back into matching his pace. After a couple of minutes, Charlie seemed to get the hang of it – at the very least, he was doing okay following Dennis’s lead. Dennis didn’t even dream about convincing him to try using tongue yet – that would definitely not go over well, as a suggestion nor in practice.

He didn’t want to be the one to tell him to stop. Charlie could break away any time that he felt he was good.

Charlie strained closer for moment before he pulled back. Dennis watched him in the immediate aftermath; he seemed to curl back in on himself, although Dennis didn’t think that it was due to regret or shame. His eyes were on his knees, and there was a little smile on his face. It wasn’t big enough to be really noticeable, especially in the bare sliver of moon in the sky, but Dennis knew him well enough to see even the slightest shift in his expression. And he was smiling.

Dennis looked back at the ground. He let himself give a little smile of his own.

Dennis and Charlie walked home a little while later, lighting up another joint that they had rolled and stuffed into Dennis’s pocket earlier. Charlie leaned up suddenly on the sidewalk to kiss the smoke in his lungs into Dennis’s own mouth, and then he fell back to his flat feet. Dennis breathed out. They both looked ahead the rest of the way home.

 

The thing with Charlie didn’t happen again, not really. Sometimes Dennis thought they were pulling on the edge of it, like it was a great blanket thrown over them both with fraying ends and they kept compulsively playing with the threads when they got bored. Leaning into each other in the park, grabbing hands when they ran from the cops, staring just a little too long before looking away. It didn’t upset him the way the thing with Mac did, because it was uncomplicated beneath the surface. There was nothing _there_ , just two friends having fun. And if that fun sometimes toed the line between something more, well. That was just fun, too.

The Mac thing, as though in direct and defiant contrast, only got worse that summer. Every conversation seemed to have two layers, and Dennis found himself having dreams very similar to the metal crate dream on a regular basis. He didn’t want to – or maybe couldn’t – refuse Mac sleeping in his bed on the nights they got too drunk to toddle home and the guest room was occupied, and those were the worst nights. None of them were good.

At the beginning of August, a couple of weeks before he was set to move into his dorm, him and Mac were lounging in the parking lot behind the library, waiting for something interesting to happen. Something interesting was generally not happening, but if there _was_ something interesting, then it would happen behind the library. That summer, the kids two levels below the cool kids on the social totem pole had picked that particular spot to get up to whatever it was they wanted to get up to (generally crushing beer and lighting shit on fire). The cool kids went to Lemon Hill. Dennis could have sailed in there with relatively little friction, probably could have even squeezed Mac into the deal, but he was still mad at Tim Murphy for fucking Trashy Trish as revenge for their stupid party fling back in May and the word around was that Tim was spending most of his summer up on Lemon Hill. Probably crushing beer and lighting shit on fire too, but with those stupid pastel shorts that snobby guys wore. So Dennis didn’t want to go there. So they hung around behind the library.

“We could try a new bar to use our fake IDs in,” Mac suggested, head lolling onto one shoulder. They had been trying to come up with a way to fill their wide-open afternoon for an hour now. And they were still the only people in the parking lot.

“I don’t feel like getting my fake confiscated tonight. Besides, Charlie’s Uncle Jack will buy us booze for only a five-dollar tip.”

“I don’t want to talk to Uncle Jack,” Mac said, wrinkling his nose.

“I don’t want to pay another $40 for a fucking ID.”

Mac groaned at the sky.

“What about rustling up Charlie and Dee,” he suggested after a moment. “See if they want to finally finish making CharDee MacDennis?”

“We’ve been working on that game for two months, and every time we try to finish, we end up just playing with what we have and getting too drunk to think,” Dennis said. “Besides, Dee’s at physical therapy until five.”

Mac sighed, watching his finger scratch at the pavement until a pebble cracked his nail and he pulled his hand back, hissing. Around sucking on his hurt finger, he said, “We can…go to the movies or something.”

“I checked the listings, it’s all chick flicks and shitty remakes.”

“Rent from Blockbuster?”

Dennis sighed, flopping forward so he could rest his chin in his hands. He slanted a glance across to Mac. “Do you have anything you’re in the mood to see?”

Mac slumped, too. “No.”

They went quiet for a long moment. Then Dennis sat up, beating his fists against the pavement and yelling, “Goddamn it! There has to be something good for us to do other than bake in the heat. Why did your dad have to get caught with _all_ your drugs?”

“I’m getting more in on Friday,” Mac said, “but that doesn’t really help us now, I guess.”

“You _guess_?” Dennis said, mocking, but Mac didn’t fight back and after a minute he was too hot to egg him on. He dropped it, saying, “Come on, the sun’s moved. Let’s go find more shade before I literally turn into a puddle and die.”

Mac rolled his eyes but pulled Dennis up to his feet. As they crossed the parking lot, apropos of nothing Mac said, “My tattoo consultation is scheduled for tomorrow.”

Dennis paused for a split second, staring at him. He started walking again before Mac could notice.

“Really?”

“Yep,” said Mac. “I finally decided which arm to put it on, too.”

“Oh yeah?”

Mac held up his left arm, curling it around to face Dennis. Doing so made his arm muscles – relatively lean and (in complete honesty) scrawny as they were – bulge and define. He was sleeveless, as usual, and his whole arm flexed visibly.

Dennis could imagine him with the last design he had shown him – it was just a rough sketch, because Mac was no artist, but Dennis could picture a professional rendering easily. Mac had been talking about getting a tattoo since he’d turned eighteen and no longer needed his parents’ permission (his mom told him that all his ideas were stupid and Luther was never around enough to take him to the shop), so Dennis had _known_ logically that it was happening. Mac even already _had_ a tattoo – a shamrock on his upper thigh, an impulse buy when he was trashed on St. Patrick’s Day when he was sixteen and he had flashed his fake at a seedy establishment – but this was different. Dennis never _saw_ that tattoo, never even thought of it. But the idea that in a week’s time, Mac would be sporting visible ink…His stomach dipped strangely.

“That’s cool,” he managed.

They were about to round the corner of the building. Mac turned and smiled at him.

And maybe it was that, in the end. That one little flash of teeth, unencumbered, totally genuine, most used on Dennis himself. Maybe it was the tattoo, something permanently marked on Mac’s skin in ways he could never guarantee he’d be.

Or maybe, the dark and most rational part of Dennis’s mind piped up – he liked to ignore that part because it always said things like _Don’t break into that store just to see if you can!_ and _Stop pelting rocks at cop cars!_ and was generally no fun, although it was a part of him that had been getting quieter and quieter as he got older – maybe it was simply that Mac was going to get tattooed, and the _un_ rational part of Dennis found the thought indescribably hot.

Sure, Mac’s tattoo was probably going to be completely stupid. That was a given. And objectively, it was dumb to get hot for something completely stupid.

But subjectively?

Subjectively made Dennis look at Mac at just the wrong moment – when he was backlit by the sun, a breeze ruffling his hair, and he turned to smile. Subjectively made Dennis push Mac hard against the brick back of the library. Subjectively made Dennis lean in and kiss him, a hard, needy press of his mouth.

Mac didn’t shove him off like he’d half-expected. Mac didn’t kiss him back for one second, two, three. Just as Mac (maybe, possibly, it was hard to tell) started to lean into it, Dennis pulled away.

They were panting harder than probably necessary. They leaned so close together still that Dennis was finding it difficult to get his face into clear focus.

Mac whispered, “What was that for, Den?”

He swallowed. He wished he had a better answer than the truth, because the truth was an unfortunate thing: truthfully, Dennis thought (hated, hoped, was terrified that) he might have fallen in love.

“Don’t forget about me when I go to college,” Dennis breathed against his lips.

And that’s what he told Mac. Maybe he even believed it. Neither one of them mentioned that they hadn’t spoken about _Dennis_ and _college_ in the same breath since May, or that he wasn’t moving out for another two weeks. Dennis stepped back, clearing his throat, and Mac straightened his shirt where the hard press of Dennis’s forearm to his chest had skewed it. They didn’t speak to or even look at each other again until they got half a mile down the road and found a new shady spot to lay in.

 

Later, Mac said, “Have you ever kissed a guy before?”

Dennis really did consider – for about two seconds – not lying.

 

He kept expecting it to come up after, like some horrible secret Mac was holding in a machine gun propped up over his shoulder, and he was waiting for the right time to fire it at him. Even more, he was afraid that Mac was going to want to _talk_ about it, in a concerned-for-him type of way. Mac would want to know if he liked him. Mac would want to proselytize. Dennis wasn’t sure which conversation would be worse.

But Dennis overestimated Mac’s willingness to talk about that kind of thing, especially where it concerned himself. Dennis remembered exactly one time that someone had assumed Mac was gay, and that person had been sent to the nurses’ office shortly thereafter with a whopper of a swollen eye. So, other than some furtive glances that lasted nearly a week, Mac didn’t bring up the incident behind the library, and Dennis sure wasn’t going to mention it himself.

One week passed, then two. Dennis was pretty sure he was in the clear.

Mac _did_ come see him off to college, but then he didn’t visit for four whole months. Phone calls could only replicate his presence so well.

 

Winter break bled into second semester, and then the summer. Then came the year after that, and the year after that. Mac visited fairly regularly, as many weekends as he could scrape together the bus fare. Sometimes, after really bad weeks, Dennis sent him the money. Charlie always came with him.

Dennis spent most of his time with Dee, despite wishing fiercely that he didn’t. His frat was only so fulfilling to him. The sex, drugs, and alcohol were good for muddling his head, but that was only an option after about six p.m. He ate lunch with Dee a lot, and they had jobs in the same department on campus. It was less terrible to be with her after her back brace came off when they were twenty; at least then it wasn’t embarrassing to be around her, not from a distance anyway.

They did finish CharDee MacDennis finally, when they were sophomores. That progress felt like a win these days.

Dennis was brilliantly stubborn, but by junior year, he relented and accepted that his Mac Feelings were not going to go away. Every time he saw him, he got reminded of them by his pounding heart when he first stepped off the bus. But drugs, liquor, and pretty women were very good for keeping those feelings on the back burner, which was the best he could ask. Staying away certainly was never even an option. Harder to ignore were the times he got very, very drunk and pulled boys back into his room and down onto his frat house bed, but he did what he could to erase it by downing more alcohol than before each time he did it.

In the very beginning of senior year, Dee lit her roommate on fire. The last piece of Dennis’s roots back to his home area of Philly went away in the back of an ambulance, and he was alone at sea.

Dee never came back to school, and Dennis graduated. He talked all semester about moving forward into the future, and all summer he made money by buying alcohol for minors with Mac and Charlie, skimming a buyer’s fee off the top the way adults had used to do to them when they were in high school. It didn’t feel scummy, the way Dennis had imagined it would when he was the one passing money to older kids to buy whatever bottom-shelf vodka he could afford then. It was just the circle of life.

Dennis moved out and got a place with Mac, and _not_ , as Dee insisted, because he was jealous that she got her own apartment first.

They would never be able to fully agree on who was the one who originally pitched the idea, but eventually, as September crawled into October and they were still making money primarily from ripping off teenagers, one of them said that they should take this basic booze-for-money scheme and go legit. The only one of them with a job was Mac, working for his dad when he was out of jail and working on and off at odd manual labor jobs when he wasn’t, so it seemed like a very agreeable idea to them all. Even Sweet Dee got in on it, trading them something or other – the details, like most things in that year where they scraped and scrounged and stole for money, was very hazy – for the position of bartender in their new business once it became reality.

Just for a little while, Dennis told himself. He would do this thing with his best friends for just a little while until he had the money and stability to do something real with his life.

The day they finally saved, planned, and bought Paddy’s was exactly four weeks after Dennis’s twenty-third birthday, a few months before the turn of the century.

 

Dee roped them into building a metal bunker that November, terrified of the impending Y2K disaster.

“Interesting, isn’t it,” Dennis mumbled around a mouthful of screws, “how this was all Dee’s paranoia and yet she’s absolutely nowhere to be seen?”

“She’s upstairs drinking a fucking beer,” Mac said, coming back into view from the other room.

He was red-faced and sweating from the heavy load he was carrying – him on one side of the shelving unit, Charlie on the other. It had been Charlie who had first mentioned that they needed somewhere to store their supplies, in case the floor got water damage or mice found their way inside to the panic room. They all trusted Charlie to protect their food.

Dennis paused from driving another screw into the crate he was making to look up at Mac. “And you didn’t rip her a new one?”

“She says that it’s a perk of not being one of the owners. Not having to deal with renovation.”

“I’m going to dock the shit out of her pay, that goddamn bitch,” Dennis said absently, returning to his crate.

Mac just grunted in response, busy with finagling the shelves through the door.

He and Charlie reappeared a moment later. Mac ducked out in an expedition to find out whether they could bolt the door themselves, and how to go about doing something of that nature if the answer was yes. Charlie rearranged his bandana to trap the stray hair that had escaped and was sticking to his damp forehead. Dennis looked up.

“We need to fix the furnace,” Charlie said, crossing his arms and watching Dennis work.

“Sounds like Charlie Work to me.”

“I’ll need a second set of hands,” Charlie said, crouching down beside him and securing the side of the crate that Dennis was working on, which kept slipping out of place when he tried to drill it. “Need some help?”

Dennis grunted his thanks, focusing on getting the screw in straight. When the crate was done, there was nothing left to do until Mac got back with news about the door. Charlie got them a few beers to sip while they waited for him.

“What do you think is really going to happen?” Charlie asked.

Dennis looked over at him. There was genuine worry creasing his forehead, something that rarely crossed his friend’s face. Charlie was often anxious, generally paranoid, and frequently mad, but he was never worried about anything serious. But he looked serious now.

“What’s going to happen with what?” Dennis asked.

“With the bar,” Charlie said. He laughed, a nervous little sound. “I don’t think I’m ready to swing being an adult.”

It seemed an awfully big question to him. Dennis never felt like an adult himself, in all honesty. He never had. As he got older, it became more and more apparent that it was all about faking it and paying your bills as they came along, about filling out whatever paperwork you got handed even when you didn’t know there was going to be a written. There was no secret, no birthday where an Elder Adult handed you all the answers or even a general manual. Suddenly you were just twenty-three with a goddamn career, and you had your own apartment, and you rarely called your parents, and you ate takeout as often as you could afford because you had never learned how to make anything more complicated than mac ‘n’ cheese from the box.

Dennis put his arm around Charlie’s shoulders.

“One day at a time, buddy,” he said, jostling him. “We’re going to be just fine.”

 

The apocalypse never came, and Dennis rung in the new millennium by getting blackout drunk by ten p.m. He woke up in a pair of Mac’s sweatpants on their living room floor, the others lying in a heap all around him. For a split second – around his headache, before he threw up – Dennis let himself smile, just a little.

 

He was good for almost three entire years. The bar sucked up most of his focus; starting a business turned out not to be as simple as just physically having all the legal documents and building space. They needed customers, they needed to constantly refill the supplies, they needed to _work_. The theoretical nature of getting drunk and hanging out every day turned out to be much, much easier than the reality of working life.

By 2002, though, they were doing – fine. They had some regulars, mostly old drunks who barely spoke a word and occasionally mumbled racist nonsense when brought their drinks, but they were doing okay. They weren’t pulling in much, but for the most part they were all able to cover their rents.

And maybe it was that settling-in period that kept his mind busy and himself from slipping up. Maybe there was something special about 2002. Maybe there was nothing special about it, and Dennis was just at the end of his good behavior – that never seemed to last forever.

He was drunk. He was drunk a lot nowadays, but Charlie was drunk with him, holed up in the back office together, so it just felt like they were hanging out. Mac was on a date, meaning he was fucking some gross girl in a sketchy place. Dee said she was also on a date, but when questioned further she said she was going out with Steven again and Dennis knew full well that that’s what she called her vibrator. Pathetic.

And so it was only Dennis and Charlie alone, and Charlie was talking about celebrating.

“We have officially owned this bar for three years,” Charlie said. “Three fucking _years_ , man.”

“Shit,” Dennis said mildly. “Is that to the day?”

“To the goddamn day,” Charlie said. “And I think we’re actually going to make it!”

Dennis snorted. “Did it take you this long to work that one out? It’s been three years, bro.”

“Shut up,” said Charlie, rolling his eyes. “You know just as well as me that we aren’t exactly what you’d call _successful_.”

“We’re still afloat, aren’t we? I say the two-year mark is when you know if you’re going under or not.” He thought he might have remembered that fact from a business class he’d taken once. Either way, it sounded right. “ _And_ we all survive, don’t we? We eat, we’re comfortable? That’s what I’d call successful.”

“Fine. We don’t pull in a ton of money, then, whatever you want,” said Charlie. He was excited, or maybe agitated – whatever it was, he seemed to have a lot of nervous energy built up under his skin, because he was gesticulating a lot while he spoke and he seemed to be vibrating minutely.

Dennis thought for a moment. His mind felt hazy, a little swampy to walk through. He had had more than a couple of shots before he started in on the beer.

“Lucrative,” he said after a moment.

“What?”

“The word you’re looking for,” he explained. “It’s like, a little more than successful. We’re surviving but we aren’t thriving.”

“Sure, man! Like I said, I don’t care,” said Charlie. “I’m making a point.”

“Could you get to it a little faster?” Dennis said. “I’m wandering off.”

Charlie made a thick noise of frustration in the back of his throat.

“I’m just saying I’m happy. We made it, dude. I think this is officially, like, _life_. We’re in it. It’s happening right now. This is forever.”

“We are twenty-six years old,” Dennis jeered. “I’m pretty sure we’ve been living for quite a while.”

“You’re being a dick,” said Charlie, rolling his eyes. He jabbed Dennis with an elbow, the same arm that then raised his beer for a drink. “You know what I mean.”

To avoid being elbowed more, Dennis got up off the overturned crate he was sitting on and perched on the desk in front of him instead.

“So what, you think you wanna be doing this forever?” Dennis asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Why not? I get to drink for free and hang out with you guys all day, every day. Why in the hell would I give that shit up?”

Dennis shrugged. Charlie squinted at him.

“You’re not happy here?”

“Look man, it’s cool that this is your last stop or whatever, but I sure as shit didn’t think I’d still be here,” said Dennis. He spread his hands. “Not that I’m not having fun. It’s great. I just thought I would have moved on by now.”

“Seriously?” Charlie didn’t look mad, just surprised. Sometimes Dennis wanted to live in Charlie’s head, where it seemed that everything was easy and everyone was just as content as he was.

“Seriously,” said Dennis. “I mean, I love this place, don’t get me wrong. Paddy’s is like, my baby. I just thought I’d have, like, a real career by now.”

“You’re not still trying to become a fucking vet, are you?” Charlie said incredulously. He was grinning a little. “Dude, that pipe dream has long since been smoked.”

Dennis stared at him. “What?”

“Like, I mean, it’s just never going to happen. Never was.” Charlie shrugged.

Laughing a little, Dennis said, “No, I mean what was that phrase? That isn’t a saying. You know that, right?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Of course it’s a saying! You know, because the dream is like, in the little pipe or whatever. And what do you do with a pipe? That’s right, you smoke it.”

“No, I definitely see your logic,” said Dennis. “People just don’t _say_ it.”

“What are you talking about? Of course people say that.”

“No one in the history of human language has ever once said that.”

“Uh, I just _did_. So suck on that.”

Dennis opened his mouth to retort, but then paused, cocking his head. At last he laughed and said, “Okay, you know what? You’re absolutely right. Besides, people should be saying it.”

“You like that?” asked Charlie, grinning, looking pleased.

“Oh, it’s awesome,” Dennis assured him.

They laughed again together, watching each other. Charlie in the chair, Dennis sitting on the desk facing him. Then they weren’t laughing, but they were facing each other. One of the threads on the blanket over them finally came free in their hands.

“You guys are like, my best friends,” Dennis said, quieter.

Something shifted in the air, and Dennis’s heart was thudding in his chest. He thought – in the aftermath, that softly settled time when it was all over – that he knew exactly what was coming, right before it did.

Charlie pushed himself up from the chair and came towards him. Dennis had time to swallow – that’s all the time he had in that one step Charlie took to reach him, and then there were hands on his cheeks and he tilted his face up right as Charlie kissed him.

It was intense, his upper lip slotted insistently between Charlie’s and it wasn’t exactly rough but it was _something_ – Dennis’s mind skipped across a few adjectives before he settled on _passionate_. They clattered their beers down on the desk beside them and Dennis held him by the sides. Through Charlie’s black t-shirt, he rubbed his thumbs in gentle circles against his ribs.

After a long handful of seconds, Charlie broke away, leaned again to kiss his bottom lip, and finally stepped back. Dennis took a second before he opened his eyes. Charlie blinked at him, and then sat back down in the chair.

“I’m glad you have no shot of being a veterinarian,” he said mildly, picking his beer back up and tipping it down his throat. “Happy three years.”

Dennis rolled his eyes and kicked out lightly, catching Charlie’s shin with his foot. Charlie pulled Dennis’s leg roughly away from him, and in the resulting clatter, Dennis slipped off the desk and landed hard on the floor on his elbow. He also knocked his bottle off the desk in the process, and when it shattered he found himself lying in a growing pool of beer.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Dennis said, glaring up at Charlie, and he tugged suddenly on his ankle until Charlie slid off his chair to the floor. The bottle in his hand didn’t break when he cracked it against the leg of the desk, but it did tip and spill half its contents onto the floor to join Dennis’s.

“Fuck _you_ ,” said Charlie.

Dennis grabbed him roughly by his hair and tugged him up until he was close enough to kiss again. This time it was more bruising, and they wrestled and kissed and fought dirty until they were lying on the floor in all that spilled beer. They kissed until the puddle grew large enough to creep toward the wires under the computer, and Dennis scrambled up to find some rags while Charlie held the plugs off the floor.

 

Dennis thought that those first three years of Paddy’s Pub might have been the only good behavior he had ever shown in his entire life. 1,095 days where he didn’t give in to that awful need he had first glimpsed in himself at eighteen in his parents’ basement, watching Lethal Weapon with the gang. That same need he’d capitulated to in Mr and Mrs Murphy’s bathroom, and in the library parking lot, and in the playground by his parents’ house, and countless times in countless places at Penn. He had been good.

It was that damned 1,096 that broke his record. After that day, he could never seem to quite remember how he’d gotten it right before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm [lesbianfreyja on tumblr](http://lesbianfreyja.tumblr.com/post/177532701765). i love to talk about my whore wife dennis and to write really long fics based on my own posts
> 
> [chap title from perfect places by lorde](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0DjcsK_-HY) xo


	2. i’ll regret it if i didn’t say this isn’t what it could be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Charlie Thing was supposed to be uncomplicated. The Charlie Thing was supposed to be easy. He wanted to be with him, but not in the same way that still flickered up in him sometimes, looking at Mac.
> 
> Because easy would have been slipping his hand in Charlie’s back pocket while they were walking around. Easy would have been not lowering their voices just because their friends were in the other room. Easy would have been just calling him his fucking boyfriend, since that’s basically what they were doing anyway.
> 
> But uncomplicated didn’t come from shoving all of his Charlie Feelings and his Mac Feelings and his Other Feelings (which were wrapped up in the same exact caution tape as those first two batches) into a locked drawer that he never visited in the back of his head.
> 
> Maybe “easy” and “uncomplicated” were just fancy ways for Dennis to dress up pretending he never had thoughts like that in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for dennis being a gay trash person and him also being depressed. also, lots of drugs.
> 
> god tier charden songs to accompany ur mood: tennis court by lorde, grand canyon by the wind + the wave, animal by neon trees, rich friends by portugal. the man

**2003-2008**

 

After the first — technically second — time in the back office, it was like they were helpless but to give in to the desire to do it again and again and again.

Dennis began 2003 much like he had begun the millennium: blackout drunk with his best friends and his sister, although he was beginning to black in and he had the vague awareness that he was at some sort of party.

The music was very loud and there was an extremely hot press of bodies around him, all of whom seemed to be shouting. It occurred to him that he recognized the signs on the walls; oh. He was at Paddy’s. Should he be this drunk while he was working? He couldn’t remember the events leading up to this exact moment, so he figured it was fine.

He spotted Mac, drunkenly weaving his way through the crowd. So it must have been okay that he was this out of it; Mac looked barely able to keep his feet.

He noticed that the crowd was shouting numbers. _Forty-six, forty-five_ …

Someone grabbed his arm and tugged him out of the crowd. His back hit the bar so hard that he could already feel the bruise forming, and he was pretty fucking wasted.

Charlie’s face swam into view, and even more slowly, into focus. He was saying something, but Dennis couldn’t hear him over the crowd and his own severely compromised ability to concentrate.

 _Twenty, nineteen_ …

Dennis waved his arms around until he found Charlie’s shoulders, and he used them to stabilize himself a little. He was still swaying when he shouted through whatever Charlie was saying, yelling instead, “Charlie! Charlie! Do you wanna kiss me at midnight?”

And Charlie rolled his eyes in a truly spectacular fashion and said, “That’s what I’ve been asking for an entire minute, dude! Who the hell else are we gonna kiss?”

It was true. Dennis had forgotten to work his magic on any of the (admittedly few) women around him, and now time was slipping fast out from under him. And Charlie was hovering at the front of his blurry vision, red-cheeked and saying something else.

_Ten, nine…_

Dennis looked around the bar, checking for the others. Mac was leaning very heavily on some girl across the room, his eyes fixed on hers. Dee was on the other side of the bar, squeezed into a booth and already making out pretty hard with some guy. Dennis looked back at Charlie.

 _Two, one_ …

“Happy New Year!” Charlie yelled, grin directly in Dennis’s face.

Clumsily, Dennis wound an arm around his neck and leaned down to press their smiles together. Charlie clutched at the sides of Dennis’s sweatshirt, and when Dennis drunkenly swayed backward onto his heels they were still so closely entwined that Charlie tipped forward with him. His feet nearly left the floor and they stumbled, still twisted together, into the bar and then down to the floor.

Dennis’s leg was twisted uncomfortably over Charlie’s lap and Charlie’s fingers were still clutching loosely at Dennis’s sweatshirt. They looked down at their tangled bodies for a few seconds, processing the fall. Then they looked up at each other and started to laugh. Dennis cradled Charlie’s cheek in one hand.

“Happy New Year, buddy,” he mumbled back, and he tipped forward and kissed him again — short and sweet, but Charlie leaned into him and kissed him back.

Masked by the crowd of legs around them, they were fairly hidden from anyone else unless somebody happened to stand directly over them and look down, but Dennis still pulled away after a couple of more lazily traded pecks on the lips and stumbled his way to his feet, dragging Charlie with him. He had lost his last beer at some point; he looked around fruitlessly for only a second before giving up and pitching forward over the bar to grab a handle so he could pour some more shots. Charlie curled his fingers hard into the back of Dennis’s sweatshirt to stop from him tumbling face-first over the bar, and he pulled him back to safety. Dennis held aloft the rescued vodka, grinning.

“Let’s do some shots!” he said excitedly.

Charlie laughed, leaning into his side, and he pumped his fist excitedly in the air.

“Hell yes!” he shouted, and he was a little too close to be just friendly when Dennis looked back at him to smile.

They had barely downed the first burning shot when a loud scuffle came from behind them, and they turned around just as Mac and Sweet Dee fought their way over to them through the crowd.

“Oh, what the hell?” shouted Dee. “You’re celebrating without us?”

“Grab a shot, baby girl!” Dennis yelled back.

Elation was still lifting in his chest and he tipped too much liquor into everyone’s glass, splashing vodka down the sides and all over his hand. They all lifted their shots up in the air to toast.

“To the new year!” they yelled, all very slurred and inharmonious. Charlie’s hip was digging into his own and Dennis was laughing as he downed his drink and everyone pounded their flat palms down on the countertop, calling for more.

 

It happened almost exclusively on good days, when neither of their tempers struck and the bar wasn’t too busy and nobody had gotten detained as a person of interest because of some stupid scheme.

But as often as it did go on, it was impossible not to notice that it ended just as it began. Charlie was always the first one to pull away. They could make out for hours and hours, and Charlie let him grind on him and they both took it to the point of panting hard into each other’s mouths, but then it was over. Charlie would pull away, mumbling about needing to get home, if Dennis did anything more than put his hands in his back pockets. One time they were on Charlie’s couch and Dennis put his hand suddenly on his thigh, inside and really far up, and Charlie jumped off of him like he had been electrocuted. They stayed up talking and playing video games for a while after that, almost like nothing was wrong, but they kept to their sides of the couch and it wasn’t fine.

It was also impossible not to notice that Charlie and Mac laid all over each other just as often now as they had when they were kids. Mac would kick his feet into Charlie’s lap while they were all just sitting around drinking beer. Charlie would lean back on Mac’s legs while they watched TV. Mac was allowed to sling an arm over his shoulder, Mac was allowed to lean into his side, Mac was allowed, Mac was allowed, Mac was allowed.

And it was _irritating_. The more he thought about it, the more it was impossible not to draw the same frustrating and (if he was being honest, which he wasn’t) jealousy-inducing conclusion.

One time it rose up in him so sharply that without thinking about it, Dennis asked, “Did it ever happen between you guys? You and Mac, did you ever…?”

Charlie’s look of confusion took nearly fifteen full seconds to morph into horror.

“Oh my god, dude, of course not! _Mac_? Are you kidding me?” He sounded totally surprised and just a little bit morbidly fascinated. It wasn’t a difficult pair of emotions to parse apart — Dennis knew Mac just as well as Charlie did. Charlie’s nose scrunched up when he leaned forward in an urgent, curious way to hiss, _“Have you?”_

And what was Dennis supposed to say that, honestly? Because the answer was no, but the answer was also yes. Dennis’s head throbbed and his collar felt just as hot as it had that day in the library parking lot, baking in the late summer sun.

Besides, him and Charlie had this _thing_ now. Even if he wasn’t jealous, it would still make things complicated.

Still, Dennis wasn’t entirely sure if he was lying or not when he scoffed loudly and said, “No way!” but somehow he felt a little like he was.

 

Dennis was contemplating the issue between him and Charlie and the distinct lack of sex they were having, leaning against the bar on a late and slow Sunday afternoon. Mac had spent longer than usual at church that day — either something had gone wrong and he was trying to curry some extra favor with the big guy upstairs, or else it was a special Catholic holiday or something that Dennis wasn’t aware of. Either way he was knocking around in the back office, getting ready for his shift two hours late, and Dennis was absently serving Bloody Mary after Bloody Mary to an old man down at the end of the bar while sipping on his own beer.

Objectively, the Charlie thing bothered him. He couldn’t figure out what the hang-up was: Did Charlie not want to sleep with him because of some particular fault on Dennis’s part, or was it just that he didn’t want to sleep with a _guy_? Except Charlie wasn’t like Mac, looking for any and all reason to tiptoe around his own issues with homosexuality and deciding on a whim that some things were Gay and Therefore Bad and others were Not That Gay and Thus Acceptable. If Charlie had already reconciled making out on a semi-regular basis, then the issue probably wasn’t that he was pulling a no-homo on taking things further.

Which, again, left Dennis to conclude that it was something about _him_ , especially because Charlie didn’t seem to have the same personal space issues when he was hanging around with Mac. Inability to find personal flaws aside, though, again he was left up against the roadblock: If the issue was not so big that Charlie couldn’t overcome it to kiss, then what about it was stopping him from moving on from second base?

Because the bases up to there, they were good. The kissing, of course, had only gotten better. What Charlie hadn’t learned in the decade or so since they first made out a little bit in high school, he had learned in the months since they started up again in the back office. Under the shirt stuff was fine. Charlie didn’t usually like to take off his own but he was good with letting Dennis take his shirt off and fooling around a little there. Sometimes they grinded a little, but not often. Any further than that was always a swift and steadfast no.

Mac finally came out of the office while Dennis was still turning the issue over. He clapped Dennis on the shoulder as he slunk around him, moving some bottles around, combining a couple half-empty handles of SKYY that they had scattered behind the counter.

“How was church?” Dennis asked absently, not because he cared but because it seemed the obvious beginning to a conversation.

Mac shrugged one shoulder.

“It was that same old Vietnamese pastor again, couldn’t understand a fucking word he was saying,” he said. “But the communion wafers were extra good today.”

Dennis smirked a little. “Nice.”

Mac shrugged again. He started rearranging the order of the whiskey on the back wall. He glanced at Dennis and said, “You got plans tonight?”

“Uh, I have this shift.”

“Yeah, but after.”

“After, it’ll be two a.m.,” Dennis said, a little testily for no real reason. “So bed, I guess.”

“Alright, no need to be hostile. It was just a question,” muttered Mac, holding up his hands.

Dennis tipped a glance to the side. “ _You_ got plans?”

“Might go and see this chick,” he said vaguely.

Dennis snorted; failure to elaborate meant she was ugly, gross, weird, or a combination of all three. Or maybe she was just old — Mac had been sleeping with some cougars lately, for no discernable reason that Dennis could see. None of them were ever hot, and it’s not like Mac needed lessons in bed — the women Dennis sometimes heard through the walls never seemed to mind his performance, anyway. Whatever the reason that made Mac not want to talk about the girl, Dennis didn’t press the subject.

“If you’re not busy,” Charlie said, appearing from the door coming out of the basement and meandering over to the counter, “You could come over to my place after work. I have the new Jackie Chan movie on DVD.”

Dennis searched Charlie’s expression, but there was nothing underlying there. No hint that he really wanted Dennis over to hook up, or that this was anything other than just a casual movie night, the invitation open to all. Dennis nodded agreeably. The old man at the end of the counter gestured vaguely for Dennis’s attention.

“Which movie?” he asked, starting to make another Bloody Mary for the guy.

“Rush Hour 2,” said Charlie. He dug around in the peanut holder and threw a few into his mouth, dodging Dennis when he swatted at his hands.

Mac and Dennis both stared at him.

“Charlie, Rush Hour 2 is an _old_ movie,” said Mac.

“No it’s not.”

“Dude, that movie is like, three years old.”

“No,” Charlie said patiently, “it isn’t. It’s new.”

“Charlie,” Mac said forcefully. He always got worked up over the stupidest shit. “It _absolutely_ is. That movie is from, like, 2001.”

Dennis nodded in silent agreement behind him. Charlie rolled his eyes and slid off his stool.

“Whatever,” he said, “it’s new to me. ‘Cause I haven’t seen it, and I just bought it.”

He wandered back toward the basement. Mac and Dennis looked at each other.

“I’ll come over,” Dennis called.

Charlie gave him a thumbs up without ever turning around, and then he disappeared. Dennis looked at Mac, who was staring in disbelief at the basement door where Charlie had gone.

“I swear to God,” Mac said slowly when he unstuck his jaw, “that guy gets more stupider every fucking day.”

Shaking his head, not waiting for an answer, Mac went back to pouring half-empty handles into each other. Dennis slid the old man his Bloody Mary and said nothing.

Dee insisted on joining their plans, even though she bitched about the movie choice from the minute Dennis slammed the Range Rover door shut on the sidewalk outside Charlie’s apartment and met her by her car.

The two of them went up together, and Dennis immediately went rummaging through Charlie’s cabinets for something to eat while Dee helped Charlie set up the DVD player. Dennis sprawled out on his couch afterwards, digging into the big bag of Wise chips he’d found. After a minute of watching the two of them struggle with and ultimately fail spectacularly at basic technology, he rolled his eyes and picked up his phone. He shot off a quick text to Mac, telling him to swing by when he was done with the girl.

Mac texted back ten minutes later, telling him that the girl was sloppy and fast and he would be over in fifteen. Dee and Charlie mumbled something about not giving a shit while they fought loudly over whether the yellow wire should connect to the yellow port. Mac showed up right as they were finally hitting play on the DVD, and the chips were down to the last dregs.

There was something peaceful and slightly unreal about any time between about two and six-thirty a.m., a feeling only intensified by bright, fluorescent lights like the ones that hung through Charlie’s apartment. None of it felt like it was happening — not Mac falling asleep with his mouth open, his head cushioned on Dennis’s shoulder, nor Dennis reaching his arm around Dee along the back of the couch on his other side, his fingers brushing idly through the hair on the back of Charlie’s head. None of it was noticeable, none of it was _happening_. They were squeezed too tightly together on the couch, like sweaty and very irritable sardines, but despite the close press of bodies, Dennis felt like he had floated clean out of his own.

Dee fell asleep after a while too, her head falling onto Dennis’s other shoulder, and that’s about when he decided that he needed to extricate himself from being the communal pillow. He finished the movie sitting on the floor, his back against the armrest beside Mac’s legs, and when the credits rolled Charlie got up and brought back in a deck of cards and a big bottle of triple sec and a handle of Jose Cuervo. His theory, here, was that they could make margaritas in their mouths and thus he wouldn’t need to put the actual work into mixing a drink, but Dennis pointed out that they only had half the ingredients and that’s not how tastebuds worked. They ended up just swigging the liqueur until they were tipsy enough to take straight drinks from the Jose Cuervo without throwing up.

While they drank, they played a couple of easy card games — a few slow rounds of Spit (but they both forgot the rules and they were too tired to slap the pile very fast); half a game of War until Dennis got fed up with the outcome being chance instead of skill; less than one full round of Presidents before they conceded that they could not, in fact, bastardize it to a point where they could hack it without a third player; and finally, a quiet game of Kings where they just agreed to both drink if either of them got an eight.

Dennis shuffled the deck around after they had used up all the cards. Charlie watched him, maybe a little mesmerized, maybe just a little drunk, as he successfully pulled off a little shuffling trick. Dennis quirked him a half-smile and put the deck down. He nudged Charlie’s knee with one knuckle.

“Your turn. I went last,” Dennis said softly.

Charlie turned over a seven. Dennis lost and took a small sip of the triple sec.

“Did you ever call that girl back?” Charlie asked, watching Dennis turn over a six and then a ten. “The one from the gym a couple weeks ago? Strawberry blonde, sparkly leggings?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said, keeping his eyes on the dirty rug beneath them. “Category…hmm. Um, Paddy’s regulars.”

“That old guy with the top hat,” Charlie said immediately.

“Stevie.”

“The dude with the felt cane.”

“Richie.”

“Fred.”

“The girl with the blind dog.”

Charlie drank. Then he asked, “How was it?”

“How was what?”

“The gym girl.” He turned over a four and Dennis won.

“She was cool,” Dennis said, scratching idly at his cheek while he watched Charlie brace to drink some tequila. His stubble was starting to grow in again; he would need to shave in the morning before he went back to work. “But she kept talking _on_ and _on_ about her ex-boyfriend.”

“So you’re not going to call her again?” Charlie asked when he was done shuddering around the Jose Cuervo.

“No,” said Dennis absently. He flicked his gaze to Charlie and said, “Do you think I should?”

Charlie just shrugged. “If you think she’s cool,” he said, sounding distant.

A low feeling, almost like a growl, revved up in the center of Dennis’s chest but he was too tired to latch onto it and unleash whatever feelings it wanted to expel, whatever fight it wanted to begin when he wasn’t even sure what the feeling was himself. Instead he turned over an ace and only thought for a split second before he said, “My rule: You’re not allowed to lie.”

Charlie looked at him, head tilted, brow furrowed. “Why would I lie?”

Almost before the question was fully out, Dennis said quickly, “Why don’t you want to sleep with me?”

Charlie stared at him, eyes wide and startled, for only a second before he looked down at the floor. Mechanically, it seemed almost, he moved to turn over another card.

Five. Charlie drank from the triple sec first, then passed it to Dennis.

“You still haven’t answered me,” Dennis said.

“You didn’t say I had to answer,” Charlie said, “just that I couldn’t lie.”

Dennis looked at him, troubled, for only a couple of seconds before he sighed and moved to turn another card.

They played a few more rounds in relative silence before Mac and Dee began to stir, still slumped on the couch as they were. They had fallen into each other in the absence of Dennis between them. Dee rose first, rubbing at her eyes, but Mac was blinking awake within minutes of her first confused, sleepy movements. Charlie and Dennis paused their game to twist and look up at them.

“Dennis, man,” Mac said. His voice was slurred and only half-coherent, his cheek red and patterned from being pressed against the rough fabric of the couch. He jerked his thumb toward the door. “It’s almost five in the morning. You ready to go, man?”

Dennis glanced at Charlie. Charlie was totally expressionless. Dennis looked back at Mac.

“I’m too drunk to drive, or move,” Dennis said at last. That was at least true; half of what had been left of the tequila and liqueur was gone. Dennis dug around in his jeans pocket for a moment until he came up with the keys, and he tossed them to Mac — who missed, and had to duck to get them out from under the couch. “Take the Rover. Drop Dee off on your way. I’ll drive your car over tomorrow.”

Dee was standing in the doorway, rubbing her arms through her jean jacket and looking blearily around the apartment like she wasn’t really awake yet, or quite sure where she was. Mac had to tug on her arm to get her to follow him out the door when they murmured quiet goodbyes and promised to see them both in the morning.

Once the door was shut, they played a few more rounds of Kings, but the game had lost most of its appeal. Charlie asked if he wanted to borrow some pajamas, which Dennis declined; he knew both Charlie’s poor hygiene and the strange clothing he wore to sleep and he’d rather stay in the clothes he’d been wearing all day than touch Charlie’s long johns. He stripped down to his boxers and cotton undershirt while Charlie pulled the couch out to a bed, and Charlie flicked out the light.

Dennis was half-sitting up when Charlie crawled his way onto his bed on his knees. It wasn’t needy, just silent and expected, that Dennis cupped his face in his hands and pulled him close as soon as he was near enough to kiss. Charlie didn’t seem shocked, just loosely raked his fingers through Dennis’s hair and leaned against his chest as they fell back against the pillows.

Dennis grabbed loosely for his thigh and tugged it over his own waist, and Charlie rolled into him, on top of him. He tasted like all that tequila and orange liqueur when Dennis coaxed his tongue into movement alongside his own. Charlie brushed his hands across his face and back through his hair. They slowly rolled back onto their sides, still kissing gently and unhurried.

Dennis brushed his hand down Charlie’s side and swept it softly across his hip. Charlie shuddered against him, but didn’t quite move away. Dennis kept his palm pressed to a spot just above his waist for a good few minutes before he slid his fingers underneath the bottom of his t-shirt.

“Stop,” Charlie mumbled against his mouth, drawing Dennis’s hand away.

Dennis put it back on his chest without comment and curled his fingers in slightly. Charlie cupped his cheeks in his hands and recaptured his lips. They traded gentle kisses back and forth again for a handful of more minutes. Dennis pulled his lower lip between his teeth and rolled them back over, Charlie on top of him, settled between his slightly spread legs. Dennis ran his hands up across his back, and Charlie settled with his forearms on either side of his neck. Their bodies were pressed together firmly all over. Dennis slid his hands back to his shoulders.

It was so dark in the room that Dennis was relying almost solely on touch; it was as though even the stars had gone out. It seemed like no light was slanting through the windows at all. The only things he could see were the vague outlines that his eyes had adjusted to, and Charlie’s face because it was looming so close to his when they stopped kissing briefly to breathe. He felt nearly as unreal as he had under the bright fluorescents before.

They fell back onto their sides, and one of Dennis’s legs shifted between Charlie’s but didn’t press up. It wasn’t insistent against him at all — it was more about curling their bodies together than it was about trying to get any friction. Charlie’s hands pressed up beneath Dennis’s shirt, soft touches stroking over his stomach and right beneath his pecs, but there was no urgency to his gentle petting, none whatsoever. Dennis was pretty sure Charlie only touched him like that because he knew Dennis liked it.

Charlie raked his fingers lightly down Dennis’s sides, not hard enough and his nails fair too blunt to leave so much as the pinkest of lines. He rolled his tongue along Dennis’s — a trick he had learned from Dennis using it on him, no doubt about that — and then pulled back and kissed him much more softly again. Dennis slid his hands from his shoulders, down his ribs and then, after hesitating just a moment, down over his ass.

“Dennis, stop it,” he said, and Dennis let go of him all at once and rolled over onto the other side of the bed, turned away from him. Charlie sighed. “Don’t get in a fucking mood thinking I think you’re not hot. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking,” Dennis said, lower lip jutting out petulantly.

After a moment, when Charlie didn’t say anything else, he turned over onto his back instead. He still kept his eyes resolutely on what little he could see of the cracked plaster ceiling, though. He could feel Charlie watching the side of his face.

“You wanna kiss me, you wanna touch me, but you don’t wanna bang,” said Dennis in a curt, slightly removed voice. He didn’t want to be too present in this conversation. He let his mind disengage a little and drift away — that was a good trick he’d learned at fourteen and had only gotten better at since. “You don’t wanna do anything below the belt, not even hand stuff. Why not?”

Charlie sighed.

“It’s got nothing to do with you,” he said. He covered his face with his hands, raking his nails down his cheeks harder than he’d just touched Dennis’s sides, leaving angry red marks there, and it senselessly rubbed at that same jealous part of him that he liked to ignore. Charlie looked…annoyed. A little pissed off. Dennis turned his head to look at him dead on. “It’s just — fuck. It’s just fucking weird.”

Dennis said nothing, just got more comfortable on the pillow and watched him work to come up with the right way to say it. Knowing Charlie, it would take a really long time and it still wouldn’t come out fully the way he wanted it. But Dennis knew how to understand him pretty well anyway.

“I don’t…like that stuff,” Charlie managed at last. “It’s gross. And it makes me feel…I don’t know. Weird. A little like I’m gonna puke. Even around the…good stuff.”

Dennis’s forehead creased. “What?”

Charlie beat his fists on the mattress, once, making it jump.

“It’s fine when I’m by myself. It’s not like I don’t…I don’t know, it feels…well, you know! It feels how it feels!”

“Yeah,” Dennis said slowly.

“But when it’s with someone else, I don’t know. Even with chicks, man, it’s not because you’re a guy or anything.” He sighed. “I just don’t like it.”

Dennis’s eyes traced the side of his face and he said nothing, not sure what he was _supposed_ to say. He didn’t really understand. He couldn’t really imagine not liking to fuck. Not all parts were fun — going down on chicks wasn’t that fun, didn’t really do anything for him — but you did it, and it was fine, and then she went down on you and that part at least felt good. So he didn’t get it.

But Charlie turned to meet his eye at last and said quietly, “Is that okay?”

And he clearly needed it to be. Still, Dennis thought about it before he answered, wanting to make sure it was true. He found that it was; Charlie was uncomfortable, and Dennis was his friend. That was the crux of it.

He smiled a little at him, and watched the frustrated line in his forehead smooth out.

“Yeah, buddy. That’s okay,” he whispered back.

After that, they closed their eyes and nestled more comfortably beneath the blankets. They slept on opposite sides of the bed and didn’t touch, but it didn’t bother Dennis like he thought it would.

 

Things were running smoothly. Dennis and Charlie made out on the good days and when business was slow. They spent all day together, hooked up a little in the back office, and then Dennis either went home or picked up some girl at a bar and took her back to his place.

All the time, he ignored that small, unsettled feeling in his gut. Things were as good as they were going to get, he reasoned, and that had to be enough.

 

Mac was playing pool with the second-hottest chick in the room. The first-hottest was leaning over the bar toward Dennis, grinning at him and tucking her hair behind her ear and asking him questions about how to make this drink or that one. Her name was either Ashley or Paisley; it was hard to hear over the loudness of the bar and music, and with how Dennis had only been half-listening. Her t-shirt was extremely low cut.

“So you see, Ashley—”

“It’s Paisley,” she interrupted, her eyebrows drawing together slightly.

Dennis cursed internally. Bad guess. He kept his charming smile plastered on.

“Sorry. _Paisley_ ,” he said. She smiled and nodded at him to go on. “Then you top it off with a couple of Maraschino cherries, and boom. A Manhattan.”

He slid her the drink. Her fingers lingered when she passed him the cash for it, and Dennis smiled at her.

Over her shoulder, Mac looked up and met his eye at exactly the same time. His expression was hard to read, his eyes dark and his mouth saying something to the second-hottest girl. Mid-flirtation. Then he suddenly looked smug, grinning at Dennis across the bar. Congratulating them both on getting laid tonight. The brief image of Mac naked on top of the brunette he was talking to flashed through his mind and was gone.

Dennis coughed and pulled his hand back swiftly. Paisley blinked at him, startled.

“Are you okay?” she said. “Dennis?”

“I’m — I’m fine,” Dennis said. He glanced at Mac again, now busily talking to the girl with his back turned, and had to drag his attention away and back to Paisley. He looked her up and down, making sure she knew he was checking her out; when he got back up to her face, she bit her lip and smiled. “How’s the Manhattan?”

She leaned forward and took a delicate little sip. When she pulled away, there was a lipstick stain on the rim of the cup.

“It’s good,” she said. “Wow, you’re right. The cherry is what makes it.”

Dennis grinned at her. She smiled right back. Then the back office door opened, and Dennis broke their stare to turn around and watch just as Charlie came out and went around the bar to check on something in the keg room. He saw Charlie look at him and Paisley, leaning across the bar toward each other, for a second or two before averting his gaze.

Then Charlie was gone, and Paisley was watching him expectantly. He knew what she was waiting for: She was waiting for him to flirt for another twenty minutes or so, and then ask her to come back when his shift was over. Maybe offer her a couple free drinks, which he wasn’t going to do. And he could have done it too, so easily, like he’d done a million and one times before — but he thought about the little flicker of something in Charlie’s face when he looked at them.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, drawing away all at once.

Paisley called after him, “Hey! Wait—” but Dennis ignored her and followed Charlie back into the keg room.

He was leaning over one of the shelves, counting something. His brow was furrowed in concentration, and he seemed to be struggling very hard with the whole thing. Dennis leaned against the wall and cleared his throat. Charlie turned around, surprised.

“Hey, dude,” he said, looking Dennis over curiously. A little absently. It was just a little blanker than Dennis would have liked. “What are you doing back here?”

“What are we doing here, man?” Dennis said bluntly.

Charlie raised his eyebrows. “Uh, I’m seeing if we need to order more limes in our next shipment. I don’t really know what you’re doing.”

“No, I meant here as in _us_ ,” he said, stalking closer. He felt shaky and strange, like a live wire was running through him instead of blood. “Are we dating?”

Charlie laughed in surprise, just a little bit. Dennis glared.

“No,” said Charlie, quickly masking his amusement a little. “No, we definitely aren’t dating.”

“Really?” said Dennis skeptically. “Because, you know, we mess around every other night and we hang out literally all of the time. We like each other, at least as people. So how exactly are we not together?”

“Because,” said Charlie, spreading his hands.

He looked startled and bemused at the same time, staring around the room like he was looking for a lifeline in this goddamn conversation. Dennis tapped his foot, waiting for him to fumble up an excuse and getting more agitated by the second.

“Because you don’t like me that way? Because we aren’t sleeping together? What?” Dennis demanded. “Not everyone sleeps with whoever they’re dating. So that’s not a good reason.”

“Who doesn’t sleep with their boyfriend?” Charlie asked, looking genuinely confused.

“I don’t know!” said Dennis, gesturing wildly in his frustration. “I guess — Christians, and — or—”

“Why are you so _mad_?” Charlie asked, running his hand back through his hair. He was still glancing around every now and then as if looking for a way to duck around Dennis to the exit. “Why the hell does it matter to you if we’re dating? Dennis, you sleep with other people all the time. I’m not the one—”

“Yeah, because you won’t sleep with me!” Dennis said immediately, and then just as quickly wished he hadn’t.

He swallowed, taking a step away from him. Suddenly he felt like he was caging Charlie in and he didn’t want to be. They didn’t talk about the fact that they weren’t sleeping together, not since that first conversation where Dennis had promised that it didn’t matter. And it didn’t, but.

But.

“Exactly,” said Charlie in a slightly calmer voice, skating his gaze away from him.

“I don’t give a shit, though!” he said. “Dude, I don’t need to fuck you. I can get on alone.”

Charlie cringed a little at the crudeness of that, but he swallowed quickly and looked him hard in the eye again.

“Why do you wanna date me?” Charlie asked instead.

“I don’t know,” said Dennis, throwing his arms out to the side. “Why does anyone wanna date anyone? You already act like my boyfriend in everything but goddamn name. So why not just…I don’t know…call it what it is and _be_ boyfriends?”

It sounded weird coming out of his mouth. A little confusing. It was not something he ever thought he would say and it tasted a little funny because of that. It sputtered him to silence and he just stood there, arms coming limply back to his sides, and stared at Charlie, who looked right back with his head tilted slightly.

“Because we aren’t boyfriends,” Charlie said finally. Dennis blinked at him, unsure what to say, not having expected he’d say _that_. Charlie looked at him a second longer and then dropped his eyes to the floor. “We’re not together, so just, you know. Yeah. Um, I gotta finish up with the limes.”

He turned away from him and went back to the shelves, and Dennis stood there standing behind him for a long moment afterward. He didn’t know what he felt. It wasn’t exactly rejected, and it wasn’t exactly upset, but it was something that felt like a close cousin of the two. Charlie didn’t look at him again and after a while he figured out how to unstick his feet from the floor and go back out into the bar.

He wanted something from the back room, but when he tried the door, it was locked. After a second of leaning close, listening, he heard the quiet grunts and little squeals that definitely equaled sex. He looked behind him; Mac and the girl were gone from the pool table, and Dee was over in the corner putting a beer down in front of somebody in a booth.

Dennis dropped his hand from the doorknob with a sigh. He wondered if Mac was banging her on the desk chair or up against the wall or maybe down on the floor if she was really wild and a little disgusting. The thought twisted like a knife directly in his gut and he leaned into it harder, blind and dark and he wondered if Mac had eaten her out first, wondered if the girl had sucked him off, wondered what position they were in.

Paisley touched his free hand when he went back behind the bar, cracked open a beer for himself, and took a long drink.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Where did you go?”

It took a couple of seconds of searching to find that same charm he had worked on her not ten minutes ago. When he finally did manage it, she smiled brightly at him.

“Nothing, nowhere,” he said, waving his hand in the air. “Hey, do you wanna get out of here? Maybe find somewhere a little more quiet?”

She nodded eagerly. Dennis drained his beer and she led him by the hand out the front door.

 

“Have you ever dated another guy?” Charlie asked.

He didn’t sound jealous or upset or like he was trying to pick a fight. He just seemed curious. This had always been both a blessing and curse about Charlie: He always somehow knew the exact thing to say that would cut right through to the core of what would best shake him, but he never seemed to realize the effect of it.

And Dennis, hiding his chagrin, thought over the question. He thought about college, about strong hands on his thighs. He could remember things — things about stubble burning up his jaw and bigger muscles than his own throwing him up against his bed, on nights he was too drunk to think it through and in the morning sometimes, too, when his dreams heated him so much that he didn’t care about who exactly was in his bed with him. He thought about Mac, and the altogether more frustrating entity that was HimAndMac, and the maybe-lie he had already told about that one time in the space between high school and college with Mac pressed greedily up against the wall and Dennis stealing his breath in ways he maybe never had a right. He thought about the looks they sometimes exchanged, now, and then he thought with a flicker of something hot and dark about how that was _nothing_ compared to the things he exchanged with Charlie (their spit, and glances that Dennis could guarantee meant something real). He thought about Charlie in the back room, and the words _We’re not together_.

Dennis said, truthfully, “No.”

Charlie said okay and passed him another beer. Dennis gripped it so tightly that it grew warm in his fist before he took the first sip.

 

Dee crushed on this guy Terrell, who ended up eying Dennis up and down instead of her. He was the first to catch on to the fact that Terrell might be gay, but the others followed suit within days. Mac fought against them becoming a gay bar, and Dennis and Charlie outnumbered him. Dennis got tipsy and him and Terrell ended up making out a little in the back alley.

Terrell cornered him when he was taking out the trash. He had just closed the lid and turned around and there he was, slouching close with his hands in his pockets. Sweat prickled the back of Dennis’s neck, hand in hand with a dim sense that this was all about to go to hell.

“What’s up, man?” Dennis said nervously, tousling the back of his hair.

Terrell took his hands out of his pockets and caught Dennis by the sides of the neck and kissed him. Dennis froze for a split second, and the alcohol already in him was running hot through his veins, and he closed his eyes and tipped his head and kissed back. Terrell’s hands were on his shoulders, were on his back, were on his hips and Dennis’s tongue was in his mouth and his mind was spinning out away from him in the darkness of the alley, and the silent, dinging warning in his head had escalated to a blaring siren. Dennis dug his fingers into Terrell’s sides and Terrell’s hands slid down, just a little too far to be polite.

Dennis pulled away from him with a gasp. His hands, when he took them off his body and drew them back, were shaking.

Terrell just looked at him curiously.

 “I’m not—” he said, swallowing hard and looking anywhere but at Terrell and running his hands all up in his hair until it was messy and wild, sticking up everywhere. “I’m not gay, I’m not—”

Terrell looked him up and down. His eyebrow cocked when he spotted the slight bulge in his jeans, and Terrell raised his eyebrows and said, “You don’t look not-gay to me.”

Dennis was breathing too hard for all they had kissed for a just a minute or so. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t _think_.

“I…I gotta go,” Dennis mumbled. “This never happened.”

He fled back into the bar. When Mac said he didn’t know how to do a tequila shot, Dennis seized on the opportunity to drink away tonight and forget it had ever happened.

The thing was, Dennis wasn’t _stupid_. He and Mac had been to parties before, a ton of times, and they owned a fucking bar, and they’d been drinking since they were fourteen, and his mother was an alcoholic and so was Charlie’s and so was Dennis’s, so he knew Mac knew how to drink tequila. He’d _seen_ Mac take tequila shots. He’d seen Mac take _body_ shots. He didn’t know why he was lying but he didn’t care so long as they were using the same means to get their different ends. He let Mac line up the shot glasses on the counter and played along. He was getting frighteningly good at playing along.

He took three more shots. The bar had quieted down some, and the loudest thing in that whole room seemed to be Mac’s smile, leaning over the countertop towards him. Mac dumped out two more shots while Dennis did the last one and sucked hard on a lime.

“Alright!” said Mac cheerfully. “Okay, so…you did the lime first, and then the shot. Right?”

“No. No, no, no, no, no. Dude. You take the salt.”

Dennis wasn’t gay. The number of boys he had kissed racked up along the inside of his skull like a physical tattoo, and he was usually good at not looking at it directly. But he was getting a little too drunk to look away now.

“Take the salt,” Mac repeated dutifully back to him.

“And then you take the shot.”

“Okay.”

He smelled it when he brought it up to his face, and turned to the side to spit out the bile that raced up his throat at the thought of doing another one so quickly. The memory of Terrell’s tongue on his was altogether more overpowering than the thick nausea that rolled through him at the prospect of doing so much tequila in a row, though, and he tossed it back swiftly, washing away the memory.

The tequila swum in his head, blurring his vision. Mac was standing close by and he looked especially good tonight, in the low light.

“And _then_ you suck on the lime,” he said. “Okay?”

“Okay. Why don’t you show me again, because I’m getting a _little_ bit confused.”

The look Dennis pierced Mac with was reflected back at him, twice as bright. He felt like he should maybe look away, but he didn’t, not when he ran the flat of his tongue slow and heavy across the salt on his hand. And not when he paused in the split second after.

“Lick it.”

“You lick the salt,” Mac murmured in an echo. His eyes were on Dennis’s face. His eyes might have been on Dennis’s mouth; he thought so, but his vision wasn’t working well enough to be sure. “Lick it…”

“And then you slam it.”

“Yeah.”

He gagged a little on it. Mac’s face lit up, and he was the most radiant thing Dennis had ever seen. He wished he could see a little better so he could remember it clearly later.

“Oh, that’s _great_ ,” said Mac. Dennis groaned. “Alright, _so_. I’m gonna do the _shot_ first, and—”

“No, no, no, no. Oh, oh please, _please_ dude. You’re not listening to me.”

Dennis wasn’t gay. Dennis once asked Charlie to be his boyfriend.

“Well I’m just not getting it, bro. So I think maybe if you just—”

Dennis was _mad_ at Charlie for not saying yes. Dennis wasn’t that drunk when Terrell kissed him in the alley before, and he’d kissed Terrell back. Dennis wasn’t drunk at all when he kissed Mac in that parking lot, but he was really drunk now. That felt like a significant factor, for some reason.

“The salt first,” Dennis explained.

“The _salt_ first.”

Dennis kissed Charlie an awful lot, nowadays.

“And _then_ the lime…” he said softly.

Dennis was sober at least fifty percent of the time he was kissing Charlie.

“Oh! You’re good at it, though,” said Mac, and the praise lit up hot and fast in Dennis’s chest like kindling that had been itching to get struck. He swayed on his feet. Mac said, “Show me again, because I’m not — the salt first, _then_ the lime?”

Dennis looked at Mac’s face — at Mac’s pretty, pretty face. He could sleep and none of this would be happening, at least for a little while. The thought was endlessly appealing. He dropped the shot glass to the counter, and hung his head down. He couldn’t lie to himself very well sober, but he could lie drunk, and he could always, always forget about it in sleep.

 

Dennis fucked up and went home with two guys that night. He didn’t remember it, but it wasn’t hard to put together the pieces: He was trashed after trying to forget about Terrell (by drinking and flirting with Mac, _great_ distraction, he thought, rolling his eyes) and a couple of the last, drunken stragglers had hit on him, and Dennis had liked the attention, and he probably forgot most of the whole “I’m not gay” speech he was giving himself and his blurry, drunk head had just snagged on all the times he had been guiltily running over and over, of when he’d hooked up with other boys before. So he must have thought, _I like sex, and I like their attention, and I’ve done this before_ and taken them up on the offer.

Stupid fucking bullshit, he thought furiously, washing the soap off his face and looking himself in the eye in his bathroom mirror. His ass hurt and his chest ached dully and incessantly. The place where his heart should be felt like an empty cavity, and it _hurt_. He rubbed his face until the soap was gone and his cheeks were scrubbed bright red. Then he let out a scream and decked his reflection, only to pull back hissing between his teeth. Stupid fucking bullshit.

He tried to regulate his breathing as he pulled the glass out of his knuckles. By the time he got down the first aid kit and was rinsing and wrapping the wounds, he was panting a little less intensely but none of the feeling swelling up his chest had ebbed.

Dennis was furious with himself, but more than that, he was just plain fucking sad.

He had slipped up, he reasoned with himself. For sure, he had slipped up big time. But there was no reason that he couldn’t fix it still — he could do better from now on. Never have that old fight with Charlie, never kiss another guy, stop eating, stop cajoling someone into hitting him every time he saw red. Stop curling up on the floor and breaking mirrors and forgetting to shower for days and days and days.

He could still be normal, he could be perfect like everyone expected. Like he was supposed to be.

He finishing dressing the wound, forwent the shower, and curled up on his bed sheets. He wasn’t that tired. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter and tried to think about anything else — he tried to focus on what specifically he would improve on after he was done indulging and picked himself up off the mattress.

His throat was starting to ache too, the dull pain edging from the center of his chest and creeping up until his whole face was burning. He rolled onto his back and pulled his knees up to his chest. It made his hurt ass throb even more noticeably. Dennis started to cry.

Fuck it, he thought listlessly. He didn’t wipe off his cheeks. He would do this and wait until he was so tired that he could finally sleep.

He could always get better to tomorrow.

 

Dennis angled Charlie’s face closer to him with sloppy, slipping fingers. They were both laughing when they pressed their mouths together, and Charlie tasted like pizza rolls chased with peppermint candy and he sounded like out-of-tune music when he sighed against Dennis’s lips and let his hands slip, tug this side of painful on his hair. He caught himself for balance on Dennis’s bed, hands pressed right beside his ribs. Dennis bit down on his own lip to keep from smiling too much and too obviously, and when he had chased the impulse back the right way down his throat, he pulled Charlie back in closer.

“Stay here tonight,” he mumbled, nosing his way across Charlie’s cheek.

“Of course, dude,” Charlie said.

They rolled themselves into a cocoon in Dennis’s sheets when they tumbled back around, and Dennis was still laughing when he pulled Charlie’s leg over his own and licked his way back into his mouth.

 

They were all a little drunk, sprawled across Dee’s living room. Mac and Dennis were nestled together on her couch, Charlie on the floor leaning against Mac’s knees, Dee with her legs spread on the chair near the couch. Mac and Charlie were passing back and forth what they said was a regular beer can but which Dennis thought he had seen them slip a couple drops of something from under the sink in earlier. It was undoubtedly the most disgusting concoction he had ever seen conceived.

They were arguing about something stupid. Dennis couldn’t really remember the specifics of the beginning, just that it had devolved into a screaming match about whether you could blow up a car by shooting a gun at the gas tank. Which was weird because Dennis was pretty sure they had started out by discussing the traffic forecast for the week.

“Of course you could do it, man,” Charlie argued. “Gas is flammable as shit! That’s the good shit that gets you high. Oh, everyone knows that if it gets you high, then it goes up easy in smoke.”

“What in the goddamn hell are you talking about, dude?” said Dennis. “You are just taking two facts and mixing them together to say something completely ridiculous! Mac, can you talk some sense into this guy?”

He smacked Mac on the arm, gesturing at Charlie after. Mac just looked at him.

“I’m not so sure, man,” said Mac. Dennis and Dee both whipped around to bug their eyes out at him. “I think that with the force and speed of the bullet, it might be able to skid in the gas fast enough to light it up.”

“But that’s not what makes gas go up,” said Dennis. “It’s not a match, it isn’t about friction. It’s about, like…chemicals—”

“I think you’re wrong there,” interrupted Dee. “It’s not chemicals. I learned about this in one of my classes.”

“Okay, well unlike you, I actually took science classes for a major.”

“For a science major, you sound really fucking unsure,” Dee said. Her voice was low and mean. Mac laughed and Dennis elbowed him hard in the side.

“Don’t side with her,” he grumbled.

“I’m not siding with anyone,” said Mac, punching Dennis hard in the thigh so he cringed away in pain. “You’re just wrong.”

Dennis shoved him over until he dug his side hard into the arm of the couch, and Mac turned so his back was pressed against it instead and he could freely kick at Dennis with as much power as he could manage.

Later, Mac went home to sleep off his beer and Dee reheated takeout to eat on her couch. That left Dennis and Charlie in the kitchen together, Dennis sitting on the counter finishing off another bottle and Charlie digging through Dee’s freezer trying to find something to slap over Dennis’s brand new black eye.

“Here’s this for your face,” he said. He blindly reached back to pass Dennis a bag of peas, his head still stuck in the freezer. Dennis grumbled his thanks and Charlie went back to digging around with both hands. “Oh, there’s actually an ice pack in here. Hold on, it’s way in the back—”

He twisted it free after a moment, and he pulled himself out of the fridge. Dennis reached for it, but Charlie bypassed his outstretched hand. Tipping Dennis’s chin to the side with one hand, he pressed the ice pack over his collarbone with the other.

Dennis blinked at him. “But Mac didn’t hit me there.”

Charlie peered underneath the ice pack for a second before he looked back up into Dennis’s face.

“There’s a bruise,” he said, shrugging one shoulder.

Dennis colored slightly.

“Oh,” he said. His voice sounded small; he cleared his throat and tried again, at normal volume. “That’s not from fighting, dude. I hooked up with a college chick a couple of nights ago. They, um, are less concerned about leaving marks.”

Charlie stared for a long moment, and then his gaze slid away, back to his fingers holding up the ice pack. “Oh.”

“It’s not — I just, I mean.” But what _did_ he mean? “I thought you knew that I was…”

“I know you do,” Charlie said, but his forehead had a little crease in it anyway.

Dennis swallowed. For the first time — maybe the first time ever — this thing with Charlie felt like it had been tipped onto a balance beam, and he only had a few crucial moments to set it back on solid ground. What surprised him in all that was that he very much wanted to keep it steady instead of letting it clatter to the floor.

He hadn’t thought it mattered that much to him, but he should have known better, he supposed. It always fucking mattered.

But Charlie spoke before he could come up with something good to say. He was still, however, speaking to his own hand.

“I’m the one who said…that we weren’t, you know,” said Charlie. He lowered his voice so that Dee couldn’t hear in the other room. “You know. _Together_.”

Dennis let out a frustrated sigh.

“I know,” he said sharply. He could read it in his expression, though; Charlie may not want to be _together_ , but he sure as shit didn’t like seeing the signs of someone else on him. Stiffly, Dennis said, “Is that still how it is?”

For a second, just one fleeting second, Charlie looked him in the eye. Something passed over his face, some inner conflict, but then he swallowed it down and his expression smoothed over. He nodded jerkily.

“That’s still how it is,” he confirmed in a quieter voice, eyes back on his hand holding the ice pack to Dennis’s neck.

Frustration rose up in him, swift and silent as fire. He wanted to knock something around. He wanted to yell _why_ in Charlie’s face until he finally gave him a straight fucking answer. He wanted to…he wanted to…

To be with him, he guessed, but not in the same way that still flickered up in him sometimes, looking at Mac. The Charlie Thing was supposed to be uncomplicated. The Charlie Thing was supposed to be easy.

 _Easy_ would have been slipping his hand in Charlie’s back pocket while they were walking around. _Easy_ would have been not lowering their voices just because Dee was in the other room. _Easy_ would have been just calling him his fucking boyfriend, since that’s basically what they were doing anyway.

But _uncomplicated_ would have been fucking, and not hiding it from their friends, and Dennis having any idea why it mattered so much to him in the first place. _Uncomplicated_ didn’t come from shoving all of his Charlie Feelings and his Mac Feelings and his Other Feelings (which were wrapped up in the same exact caution tape as those first two batches) into a locked drawer that he never visited in the back of his head.

Maybe “easy” and “uncomplicated” were just fancy ways for Dennis to dress up pretending he never had thoughts like that in the first place.

He sighed. He reached out to grip Charlie’s shoulder, and Charlie looked up at him. This time, his gaze held.

“Let’s go home,” Dennis said. “I’m fucking beat.”

They murmured goodbyes to Dee and parted ways down on the sidewalk.

 

Dennis was having a good morning, making fun of Mac’s tattoos and shooting some hoop and playing keep-away from Charlie. They were both a little ticked off with him, and he was laughing. And then there was a woman there, calling Charlie’s name.

Stacy Corvelli had a kid and it was Charlie’s. Dennis’s headache manifested very specifically beneath his left temple and beat hard against his skull.

She didn’t want anything from him, just for him to meet the kid. Dennis went with him for moral support. Stacy was nice, grinning and making small talk when she opened the door.

She gestured between the two of them with a little laugh.

“So you two are…together now? Or…” She trailed off meaningfully. That smile was still stuck on her face, all the more irritating because it seemed totally goddamn genuine.

Dennis glanced at Charlie, confused, sort of wondering what he was supposed to say. They were standing what Dennis considered a reasonable distance apart, and they hadn’t touched each other since weeks before this kid bomb had been dropped, and definitely not after that. Charlie looked back at him, mouth ajar.

They kissed and hung out and Dennis had come to sit with him while Charlie had stayed up half the night worrying over his new paternity problem with him. And people from high school were still here, acting like this was an easy assumption to make about them. Didn’t all that count for anything?

 _Why not just be boyfriends?_ Dennis had asked.

 _Because we aren’t boyfriends_ , Charlie said. The memory made him sound sharper, meaner than he really had, and Dennis’s head hurt. _We’re not together._

 _Have you ever dated another guy?_ Charlie asked, and Dennis said, _No._

 _I’m the one who said that we weren’t together_ , Charlie said. _Is that still how it is?_ Dennis asked. Charlie said, _That’s still how it is_.

Stacy Corvelli asked, _So you two are together now?_

The look on Charlie’s face clearly said nothing had changed. Fury and frustration rose in him, but Dennis looked back at her, laughing it off, shaking his head.

“No,” he said easily.

“No! No,” Charlie said, so emphatically that Dennis’s stomach burned a bit.

“Nah, no,” said Dennis, pushing down the feeling. “I’m just here for moral support.”

He felt it was a little unnecessary for Charlie to tack on, “We’re not—” but there he was, steamrolling through the sentence anyway. Dennis stared at him.

“Yeah, we’re not…That’s not even a…” Charlie said, searching for the words. Dennis realized he was boring holes into his profile while he looked at him, that he was watching him a little too intensely, and he recognized dimly that he should tack back on some sort of cursory expression. He turned back to Stacy with what he hoped was an easy smile, mumbling his assent. “I brought him along. So…”

Dennis chuckled a little for her, but he couldn’t resist glancing at Charlie again. This same fucking argument, beating him around like he still had that headache from yesterday morning.

 _That’s not even a possibility_ , Charlie had wanted to say — that was clearly the end of that sentence. Dennis gritted his teeth. _Why not?_ he wanted to shout back. _You won’t fucking tell me why!_

Stacy turned around to lead them inside and Charlie and Dennis got to look at each other without her eyes on them. Dennis’s jaw was set, and his irritation must have shown clear as day on his face because Charlie just tilted his head to the side a little, like he was begging him not to do this, not right now. Not when so many bigger, worse things were happening to him.

Dennis gave in first and led the way inside, and Charlie was already shaking his head. This argument was not put to bed.

As it turned out, the kid was a fucking brat. They took him in for a blood test, just in case.

While Charlie was at the desk with the boy, filling out forms, Dennis stayed behind in the waiting area and flipped through the newspaper to take his mind off things. Fuck today. Even reading about the hellhole that was politics would be better than this.

A woman, gaunt with rotting teeth, leaned over the back of her chair and up close to him.

“Hey, pretty boy.”

Dennis turned slightly to look at her.

“Whatcha here for?” she asked him. She was smirking like she thought it was charming, but it definitely wasn’t.

“My friend’s getting a blood test.”

She glanced over at Charlie by the desk.

“Your boyfriend?” she asked.

Dennis raised his eyebrows and heaved a huge sigh.

“No, he’s not my…” he started off angrily, then trailed off, shaking his head. Stupid fucking bullshit. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Sometimes, Dennis really felt like FUCK YOU was being spelled out for him in the goddamn clouds.

They found out that Stacy Corvelli had a kid but it wasn’t Charlie’s. It was good news, but the unnecessary stirring up of that dumb goddamn argument about exclusivity was just plain irritating. Dennis wondered just how many headaches he could endure in this life before his fucking skull exploded.

 

Maybe it was the brief return of the woman he lost his virginity to into their lives, but Charlie had been itching lately to smoke weed like they were still eighteen. Dennis, of course, didn’t mind — not as long as he was getting smoked up for free.

They locked themselves in the back office after, another plan gone wrong — the kid wasn’t his, the waitress wasn’t impressed, and they only narrowly avoided a lawsuit for letting the boy get drunk on the premises anyway (Dee threatening to counter-sue for leaving her kid alone with a stranger who ran a bar successfully put the matter to bed, the only casualties being high tension). It was a normal way of things. Charlie rolled a joint and Dennis lit it while it was stuck between his lips.

“Women are bullshit, man,” Charlie said as he exhaled. He leaned back onto his free hand where he was sitting on the desk; in the chair in front of him, Dennis swiveled from side to side and let him rant. “You sleep with them one time and you have to worry about being fucked over by them for like the _rest_ of your _life_.”

Dennis reached out in a gimme-gesture until Charlie handed over the joint. Charlie said a few more choice things about how sleeping with women was never worth the trouble. Dennis exhaled.

“I’m not following your logic, but I agree with the beginning,” Dennis said around his second hit. He hadn’t smoked weed in a while; he coughed hard. “Oh, Christ, that burns. But yeah, it’s a shame that sleeping with them is too fun to override the consequences.”

“It’s not even worth it,” Charlie sighed, looking off into the middle-distance now as he settled into his thoughts. “God. I had more fun kissing you then I ever did with Stacy.”

“I should hope so, considering you do it on a pretty regular basis.”

Charlie’s eyes refocused, and he turned to grin at him.

“I meant that first time,” Charlie said. “You’d hope that your first time having sex would be better than getting mind-numbingly high and kissing your friend for like, two seconds on a playground. But sadly, no.”

Dennis grinned. Smoke spilled out of the cracks where his lips parted as they stretched.

“Maybe it’s just because I’m so good in bed.”

Dennis leveraged himself off the chair by the armrests and loomed over Charlie, still sitting on the edge of the desk. He planted his arms around either side of his thighs. Charlie rolled his eyes.

“I’ve seen Olympic athletes with smaller egos than you,” he said, although he still reached to touch Dennis’s shoulders.

“I only say it ‘cause it’s true,” he argued, and he didn’t give Charlie a chance to fight back because he closed the few inches still between them.

The kiss was light, eager but gentle presses of their mouths together. Charlie tugged on his hair, not insistent at all, and Dennis leaned further into his space to kiss him harder, deeper. His tongue teased against Charlie’s lips, but Charlie was the one who sealed their mouths properly together and tilted his head back further to keep them pressed close together. His tongue slid smoothly alongside Dennis’s. Dennis was grinning, still keeping their lips together, and he dug his fingers into the topside of Charlie’s thighs where his palms had slipped down toward his knees.

Charlie plucked the joint from Dennis’s hand and leaned away from him to hit it. Then he stubbed it out, set what was left of it down next to them, and leaned back up to kiss him.

Dennis tugged on his knee and Charlie took the hint, hopping off the desk when Dennis started to inch his body away and following him back down where Dennis sat back hard in the chair. He slid his hands around the back of Charlie’s thighs and pulled him down into his lap, licking expertly back into his mouth as soon as they were settled and free from the dangers of biting too hard on things they shouldn’t.

He dragged one hand up his thigh to curve over his hip, the other getting scratched by his beard when he cupped his cheek. His index finger curled through one of his belt loops and stilled, just wanting something to hold onto for stability.

Charlie’s palms hit Dennis’s stomach and slid up to rub across his chest; he looped them loosely around his neck and Dennis leaned up to nibble on his lower lip, pressing his tongue there after to soothe the ache. He knew Charlie could take the pain — was probably too high to feel it even if Dennis had broken skin, which he hadn’t — but he didn’t want to cause him any discomfort unnecessarily, either. So he swiped his tongue over his lower lip and let Charlie’s follow it back into his own mouth, where it was a weight, fat and heavy but familiar as they slid together in lazy rhythm.

For a while they just sat there, trading slow kisses back and forth. Charlie seemed content to pin him there all day, thighs trapping Dennis firmly to the desk chair, his fingers light and almost curious as they traced over Dennis’s body. As though he didn’t know him head to toe by now — still, the pads of his fingers ran lightly over Dennis’s collarbone, over his cheeks, over both of his lips when they pulled back to breathe and stare softly at each other. Charlie was quiet a beat too long before Dennis rubbed his thumbs lightly above the waistline of his jeans and pressed their mouths back gently together.

Charlie grabbed the sides of his face in either hand, hard but not needy. Charlie was never needy with him.

That was still the confusing part, Dennis thought as they kept kissing, no strings attached, for a while. Charlie liked him, Charlie liked kissing him — those were both things that he _knew_. But needy? Charlie certainly didn’t ever swell in his jeans when they did the things they did together, he didn’t ever rock his hips forward in the way that was becoming increasingly appealing to Dennis right at this moment.

And Dennis — he never would have pushed him. Not after that one time. But Charlie was kissing him, deep and sweet, and the urge to rock his hips was fighting brutally with the desire not to dislodge Charlie from his lap. He knew Charlie could feel it against the backs of his thigh, where Dennis was starting to get hard, but neither of them reacted to it. They never did.

And Dennis didn’t _mind_. Charlie liked kissing him — he’d said so, he acted so — and that was what was important. Charlie was probably the only person on earth he believed so blindly about shit like that. Dennis just still didn’t _understand_.

Charlie’s mouth fell open as Dennis’s lips skimmed down his jaw, and he pressed light little kisses around his Adam’s apple for a few seconds before he kissed his mouth again, short and sweet.

“Do you want to get dinner?” Dennis asked.

“Fuck, yes,” Charlie said, petting a hand through Dennis’s hair like he was a cat or something. He knew his hair was probably really fucked up from Charlie running his hands through it for the past hour or so, but that didn’t stop him from trying to smooth it back down in irritation. “I can call for takeout.”

“No, I’m in the mood to go out,” Dennis said. His fingers played idly with Charlie’s belt loop where they were still curled through it, and he tugged meaninglessly on it. Charlie didn’t come closer or inch further away. It didn’t matter.

Charlie ducked to press one more soft kiss to his lips, and then he slid from his lap and to his feet. Dennis didn’t bother hiding the bulge in his jeans — he never did, and besides, they both knew it was there just as surely as they both ignored it.

But Dennis’s foot was tapping all throughout dinner, even while they shot the shit about the game that had been on last night, and afterwards he bid a quick goodbye when he dropped Charlie off at his apartment complex and then sped along to the nearest cocktail bar he could find.

His skin was still itching, was the thing. His tongue remembered the hot pressure of another insistently up against it, his lips were bitten-red from someone else’s teeth, his throat was raw from wanting. He _needed_.

Dennis picked up some drunk sorority girl after doing a few rounds of shots with her. They fucked in the back of the Range Rover and then he drove her and a couple of her obnoxious, loud friends home — all of them spent the entire drive asking the girl about Dennis’s dick, as though they didn’t notice at all that he was sat right there with them. He couldn’t get them out of the car fast enough.

He passed out within seconds of getting home at last, head fuzzy as hell from beers with Charlie and shots and cocktails with the sorority chicks, and he didn’t wake up for nine whole hours. It was two more hours’ sleep than he had gotten all week.

He woke up with his mouth fuzzy, his brain fuzzier, and he almost gagged when he brushed his teeth with his too-minty toothpaste. Hangovers were the single most bullshit thing on the planet. Weren’t things supposed to get better in the morning and easier with time?

He had a text from Charlie, when he finally plugged his forgotten phone in and the battery turned on. Just a single picture, blurry and blown up, of a huge martini glass, accompanied by a question mark. Dennis rolled his eyes and texted back a series of exclamation points.

“Where are you going?” Mac asked, on Dennis’s way out the door. His fingers stilled on his coat on the hook.

“I’m grabbing brunch with Charlie, he invited me,” Dennis supplied. It felt natural to add, without a second thought, “Do you want to come with us?”

Mac was already dressed for the day, and he accepted the invitation instantly, reaching only to pull on some shoes. On the drive over, he asked whether Dee was also coming; Dennis replied that he didn’t know. No one hadn’t mentioned it, but often that didn’t matter anymore than if they had.

Dee wasn’t there when they arrived, though, and Charlie said she wasn’t coming, and the three of them sat down at a table outside the diner where they sometimes came after they had gone hard the night before. It was a stupid thing to waste money on, because whether they drowned out the headache in mimosas and a stack of pancakes with thick helpings of maple syrup or in bacon that Dennis cooked himself, they still had bad hangovers and this way they were draining their wallets, too. Mac was a big sucker for their syrup though, and he loved it there.

They filled up on coffee and cinnamon buns and pieces of fruit. Charlie dribbled syrup all down his chin. Mac laughed hysterically when their waiter tripped over his own feet and put his hand down hard in somebody’s food when he tried to catch himself. Dennis rolled his eyes, smiling at them both. He shoveled a huge forkful of eggs into his mouth and felt someone’s leg press up against his under the table. Without looking — which would have been far too obvious — it was impossible to tell to whom the warm pressure belonged.

 

Things with Charlie quieted down that year, their backroom hookups getting farther and farther apart as Dennis spent more and more time picking up girls he could close the deal with. The year after that, it happened even less.

Maybe it was him shooting Charlie in the head, or Dennis running him down with his car, or his dad coming back and sticking around and making Dennis’s brain buzz furiously all the fucking time, but they stopped kissing and groping each other so often and spent more time just genuinely hanging out when they were alone. Charlie seemed less into it when they did hook up, and Dennis had to admit that some of the fever that had wound him so tightly before had faded for him too. The old fight about labels, about exclusivity and just giving into calling each other boyfriend, seemed pointless in the new light. They settled into just being friends with occasional benefits instead of the friends-and-maybe-something-more that they had been for these past few years, and Dennis knew it wouldn’t do him any good to wait around for what he wanted from someone with whom he was just having fun.

Frank always seemed to be there with Charlie anyway and the thing between them, tentative and tenuous and intangible as it was, only ever happened on good days anyway. His father brought up too many of those teenage insecurities, too much of that familial frustration. Having Sweet Dee constantly around was bad enough.

They got in an argument after the underground fight club thing, after Mac had safely gone home and there was nobody else around to hear them duke it out on the sidewalk outside Charlie’s building.

“I’m not pissed off that you wouldn’t take your clothes off in front of me and Mac!” Dennis was screaming. “I’m pissed off that you said it was gay!”

It was true; he knew how Charlie got about being in any state of undress, even when it was just the two of them. His old fears of vulnerability, and observation, and being touched. Having Mac around, him and his endless fucking _No homo_ s (enough that they could cover the entire ocean floor and then some), would have only made things one hundred percent worse. Dennis had been spending more time with Mac lately, probably because his time wasn’t getting held up by his thing with Charlie so much anymore, and he knew exactly how Mac could be.

But the _gay_ comment.

“It _was_ gay!” Charlie yelled right back. “You standing around my place, talking about getting me in short-shorts and begging me to take my shirt off, you know what that sounds like—”

“It wasn’t _sexual_ ,” Dennis insisted. “Why the fuck did you have to say it was gay—”

“It was gay! Why does that bother you?”

“I’m bothered that it bothers _you_!” Dennis shouted, gesturing wildly at him. “Oh, suddenly you’re afraid of being too fucking gay with me? Really?”

Charlie’s expression cleared for a split second as understanding came over him, and then he closed off again and just looked pissed.

“That had nothing to do with you and me, man,” Charlie said, shaking his head, looking disgusted.

“You don’t wanna be gay with me?” Dennis said, and he was really annoyed at how calm Charlie seemed now because he was noticeably louder than him and it felt like Charlie didn’t even fucking care. “That’s a fucking joke, dude. Three fucking years you have no problem, but now! Oh everyone, look out! Charlie Kelly is a gold star fucking heterosexual now!”

“Fuck you,” Charlie bit out. “What are you, goddamn twelve years old? Like you have any right to get mad.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” said Charlie. He was shaking his head again, but this time he was backing away at the same time. Goddamn it. This argument was not over. “Forget it, dude. Go home. I’m too pissed to hang out today. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Charlie!” he yelled after him, but Charlie flipped him off and slammed the door.

Dennis wanted to hit something, he wanted to tear something apart. He let out a yell of frustration and kicked the side of the building, hard. He yelped in pain and set his foot down gingerly on the pavement. He went around the side of the place and threw a couple of rocks up at Charlie’s window, but none of them flew high enough and they all clattered against the wall and fell back down.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered as he finally gave up and started for home. “God _damn_ it.”

 

They were back at it again within a couple months. Dennis ran for office and Charlie was his campaign manager; Charlie was complimenting his hair and face and body all afternoon; Dennis and Charlie were kissing on his kitchen counter between coming up with promo ideas. Dennis put his hands on Charlie’s hips and left them there. Charlie ran his hands up under Dennis’s shirt, all over his back.

Charlie kissed him on the corner of his mouth when he left for the day. Dennis didn’t know it yet, but it was the last time he would put his hands on Charlie all year.

 

“You don’t have to do everything Frank says, you know.”

Dennis turned to look at Mac, but he was either getting very good at his poker face or he was genuinely just saying so with no ulterior motive. He tossed another piece of bread into the river on whose banks they were currently sitting cross-legged beside each other.

“Tear ‘em off into strips, man. If you throw a whole slice, it will just sink,” Dennis murmured. He leaned over and tore off a corner of crust, tossing it as far out into the Schuylkill as he could. It landed a few yards into the water in front of them. “And I don’t do _everything_ Frank says. It’s just — he’s my dad, man. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t?” Mac said, a little amused.

They both watched as duck came quacking along. It ignored Mac’s big, whole slices and pecked up the little bit that Dennis had thrown, the only piece in the river small enough to fit in its beak. Then it went swimming on. Mac muttered something and started tearing the bread into smaller pieces.

“You used to sling coke for money,” said Dennis. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Because Dad asked,” said Mac.

“Because you wanted to impress him,” Dennis corrected him, “and because you wanted your part of the cut.”

“Oh? And that’s not why you do everything Frank says?”

Dennis thought about his recently-padded wallet and the disapproval that never seemed to leave his father’s face, a look that stung even though Dennis had long since given up on trying to make it disappear.

“I told you,” Dennis said, jaw clicking. “I don’t do everything he says. And when I do happen to listen to him, it’s just — It’s complicated, okay?”

“Dennis, you hate that guy.”

“I know,” he said in a hard voice. “But he’s still my dad.”

He considered the subject closed and went back to watching the ducks come scoop up the food before it got too water-heavy and sank. Mac let the topic lie for less than a minute.

“I don’t know why you give a shit what he thinks of you,” he said eventually, sounding oddly bitter. “The guy thinks you’re wasting your life. He’s only doing the same thing because he thinks that’s _cool_.”

“I don’t care what he thinks about me!” Dennis said loudly. Mac wasn’t the only one to startle; several small birds erupted from a bush nearby, scattering into the sky.

“That’s right,” said Mac, and he definitely sounded bitter now. “You don’t give a shit what _anyone_ thinks of you.”

Dennis turned to him, surprised. Mac’s expression was set and cold, but Dennis could see that he was a little wounded, too. It was a look that just made Dennis want to shake him. He didn’t know what this fight was about, but then, he rarely did anymore. Maybe that was why he so rarely won any of his arguments nowadays without making things physical.

He said nothing, going back to tossing bits of bread into the water. When they ran out of food to throw, he sighed and leaned his cheek against Mac’s shoulder. Mac relaxed as soon as he touched him.

“I don’t want to go back to how things were,” Dennis said quietly. “I fucking hated growing up. I just want him to go away.”

Mac didn’t move, but he didn’t push Dennis away either and that meant something, he thought.

“It wasn’t all bad,” Mac said. When Dennis tilted his face to look up at him, he elaborated, “Growing up, I mean.”

“Tell that to the scars on my knuckles,” Dennis muttered.

Again, Mac didn’t answer him immediately. Dennis watched Mac’s hands twist together on his lap.

“Well, one thing that definitely hasn’t changed since we were kids — you’ve got me,” said Mac at last.

Dennis turned his face into Mac’s neck for half a second before he pulled himself upright. He looked out at the river, pretending like he couldn’t still feel him as surely as if they were still touching. Like Mac’s presence beside him wasn’t as obvious and distracting as if his body left physical vibrations in the air that reached out and brushed Dennis’s arms, summoning goosebumps.

“Yeah, buddy,” said Dennis hollowly. He paused, and then said, “If your dad came back today, and he wanted to book it out of state and start a new life and he asked you to go and help him — would you do it?”

Mac turned to look at him, and their faces were close. He didn’t answer, but seconds passed and he didn’t have to. Mac looked away. His fingers were plucking out strands of grass and tossing them down onto Dennis’s bare ankle.

“There’s only maybe two people I’d do that for,” Mac whispered.

He looked up for a split second again, just to catch Dennis’s eye. Dennis swallowed hard, but Mac had already turned away before he could fumble up something to say. He dusted off his hands and got up, wandering away down the bank to get closer to a swan that was poking its head above some reeds.

Mac hadn’t asked, but Dennis wondered all the same: Would Dennis do the same for him?

He didn’t know.

 

Frank wasn’t his biological father. Knowing that Frank wasn’t his real dad settled some of Dennis’s temper, which had been simmering at the surface all year. He could talk back to him, he could ignore him, he could curse at him and yell at him and tell him what an asshole he’d been for Dennis’s entire life. But some of it — Frank knowing him on a deeply personal level, Frank remembering graphic moments from Dennis’s tumultuous and embarrassing childhood and teenage years — couldn’t be solved by having a new dad. Some things were ingrained just by virtue of Frank raising him, and there were ways he knew how to get under Dennis’s skin that no one else, not even Dee, could really do to him.

Frank _might_ have been Charlie’s biological father. Dennis’s Charlie Feelings were significantly tamer than they used to be, but it was still weird. The truths and the feelings and the maybes all swirled oddly in Dennis’s stomach.

All of 2007, Charlie and Dennis kissed twice. Both times, they were piss drunk and celebrating something: once when they survived getting held hostage, and again when they made enough money one night that it warranted breaking out the celebration tequila. Dennis was used to celebrating with him like that, and it was easy and natural and — just plain fun. For the first time a while, it was just plain fun again.

Charlie grinned at him in between those times and said bluntly, “Kissing is gross.”

Dennis stared at him. He had had Dennis’s tongue in his mouth not three weeks ago, and now — now he was sitting on his couch with a girl from the Korean restaurant down the street, fighting about kissing.

“How is kissing gross?” Dennis demanded.

“You know, we just don’t like it,” said Charlie, shrugging. “We’re not into it, you know? It’s sticky. It’s like there’s candy and beer in your mouth.”

Dennis closed his eyes in frustration. He wanted to yell at him that he should stop sucking on lollipops before kissing Dennis while he was drinking a beer, and that way he wouldn’t have that problem. But he didn’t want to say it in front of the girl.

And then Charlie still kissed him again four months later, when they were laughing and happy and chugging tequila. Dennis was only half-present, but he was distinctly remembering Charlie telling him that he didn’t like kissing. But they were drunk, and excited, and celebrating together. Dennis wondered if Charlie even knew how happy he could be if he heard that he never had to do this ever again, and things would still be okay. But nobody had ever told him that.

And all that year, Mac teetered. Men and women should raise a baby together, he said. It’s biology. It’s natural. Man plus woman equaled natural and Godly and good, everything else equaled sin.

But Dennis called him _baby_ twice during football tryouts for the Eagles, and Mac was excited and thrumming with energy and just smiled at him both times. Mac told him that he loved him when they got held hostage. Mac assumed he was a prostitute for guys when they’re trying to buy back their coke for the mob, and he seemed totally fine with it.

Sometimes money plus good spirits plus Dennis himself seemed to equal a little more than natural and Godly and good. All of that should have meant sin but Mac grinned at him and Dennis smiled back and neither one of them seemed to care.

Mac pretended to go down on him when they were dancing to win back the bar, and Dennis was furious with Charlie for putting it up in the first place, and he was riveted by Mac down on his knees, and he flushed red from his chest down to his toes. That week, he had three dreams that revolved around him, Mac, and close spaces. When Mac started sleeping with Carmen again, it took everything Dennis had to seem happy for him. Dee said, “Oh, gross!” and Dennis remembered a distant conversation with himself about being a better person.

2007 ended. Dennis’s best friends were still hypocrites, albeit ones with a thick thread tied around their pinky fingers that had the other end wrapped around Dennis’s heart, and they seemed to tug at it whenever they pleased. Dennis wanted to be a better person, he wanted to be _normal_ , but it was hard when felt like he was losing more and more control every day instead of ever gaining any back.

 

Mac was touching his chest, Mac was holding him under his arm, Mac was walking too close to him hauling a cooler full of beer in one hand while Dennis lugged along a bunch of cardboard that they intended to set up as a little shelter while they waited for Rickety Cricket to stumble on by so they could tackle him and win the hunt. They had already crushed four or five beers between the two of them, just tossing them onto the street as they walked (or, in Dennis’s slightly more refined case, into garbage cans as they passed).

Mac chugged the last of another can and crushed it in his fist, dumping it down on the ground just like with the other empties.

“Ugh, this is great,” he said, hopping a little as he walked. “I feel so hyped up. I feel like I could run a marathon or something, dude.”

Dennis’s attention was fixated on the freckles dotting Mac’s shoulders, and he worked to drag his gaze back up to his face.

“What?”

“I’m just saying, I’m like, full of energy,” said Mac. He was smiling and it made the edges of Dennis’s mouth curl upward, too. “Did you put uppers in this beer or something, bro? I feel like I’ve got a rocket up my ass or something.”

“Of course I put uppers in it,” said Dennis. “I don’t want you passing out on the sidewalk while we’re waiting for Cricket to come by. Only a little bit, though, I don’t need us getting all manic high and you start trying to do backflips off the side of the building again or something either.”

Mac high-fived him.

“That’s so awesome,” he said, then paused and pointed at him. “I could totally do a backflip if I wanted to right now though.”

Dennis rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh. Sure.”

“I could,” Mac said. “I just don’t wanna, because — you know, I don’t think you put enough Riterall in these beers, bro.”

“I’m sure that’s it,” Dennis said, not at all masking the sarcasm in his voice but well aware that Mac could and would ignore anything he didn’t want to hear.

Dennis threw his arm around Mac’s shoulders and jostled him. Mac laughed excitedly.

“We are crushing this!” he said.

“I know!” said Dennis. “Dude, I’m kind of feeling like we should do a man hunt every single weekend for the rest of our lives? Hear me out—”

“I was thinking the same thing!” Mac said, spreading his hands. “Oh my god, Dennis! You read my mind, that is _exactly_ what I was thinking.”

“We just make a really good team, you know?”

“We are _great_ at this,” Mac agreed. “I’m just saying, we have never really succeeded in anything we’ve tried to do but I’ve just got a really good feeling about this one.”

His mind was buzzing. There was _definitely_ enough Riterall in the beer. Mac was just smiling widely at him, eyes tracking Dennis’s face.

“We could hunt every dude in this city,” Dennis said.

“We _should_ hunt every dude in this city!” said Mac. “I’m bustin’, dude, I wanna go out and find him right now.”

“I know!” said Dennis. “I feel like my whole body is buzzing, I’m so pumped up—”

“It’s the drugs, they’re _really_ good drugs—”

“They _are_ really good drugs! We should start taking a lot more Riterall too, bro. Like, Riterall every day of the week.”

Mac paused, put his hand on Dennis’s shoulder to stop him too and his face was close and he said excitedly, “We could take Riterall _twice_ a day.”

“Twice a day, dude! Holy shit, that’s such a good idea!” said Dennis. “Oh, man, we are so fucking smart right now. Our minds are on the same wavelength or something, I swear.”

“Right?” said Mac.

“Right?” said Dennis.

They paused. Dennis said, “We are—” and the rest of whatever it was he had wanted to say skittered off into the great abyss as Mac leaned in and then stopped, a bare few inches away from him. Dennis’s breathing cut short and he just gazed at him, wide-eyed and heart hammering from all the uppers, until Mac pulled back again with his eyes still bright even as cloudy as they were with booze and pills.

“We _are_!” Mac shouted back excitedly, nonsensically, and Dennis laughed and high-fived him.

“We’re killing this,” Dennis said. “How do you feel about right here to set up shop?”

He gestured to the general area of sidewalk they had stopped on. They argued a little about doing it one street over, and finally they agreed to lay low a little ways down the block in front of a foreclosed sign so nobody would bother them about loitering. Dennis set up the cardboard box while Mac passed him a beer and critiqued his handiwork without offering any help at all.

It was like Dennis had imagined it. Between the pills and the beer, he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t. Mac was leaning into him and talking about his pubes. Dennis was leaning into _him_ and talking about his junk. They were laughing and planning and Dennis couldn’t stop looking Mac up and down. It was fucking ridiculous to think Mac’s mouth had nearly just been on his and they weren’t goddamn talking about it. But Dennis was drunk and high and he didn’t even care.

“Cricket!” Dennis called, and the whole thing was forgotten in a haze of running.

They lost him, he teamed up with Frank, Cricket got a few good licks in and then Mac and Dennis ended up winning the hunt after all.

Mac was full of energy, shouting excitedly around the jawbreaker he was chewing on. Tea-bagging Cricket after they’d cornered him had left him itching to burn off more of the thrill running through him, and Dennis was inclined to indulge him. He felt a little that way himself.

“What do you wanna do?” Mac asked, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet as they strolled down the sidewalk.

“I don’t know,” Dennis said, shooting him a look out of the corner of his eye. His lips curled up in a slight smirk. “What do _you_ wanna do?”

Mac met his eye and threw his head back laughing.

“Strip club?” he asked.

Dennis agreed eagerly. They ended up seated across the table from each other in the dim blue light, taking shots and laughing harder and harder as they consumed more and more alcohol.

“Should we buy a lap dance?” Dennis asked, twisting around in his chair looking for a suitable girl to wave over.

“Do you have any money?” Mac laughed.

They dug around in their pockets. One of the girls finally noticed them and came over. Her hips swayed close to Dennis’s face, and both their eyes were stuck on her chest.

“Can I interest you boys in a private dance?” she asked, low and sultry and warm.

“We have, uh, about twenty bucks between us,” Mac said, laying the pooled money out flat on the table. “What can that get us?”

She arched a perfectly drawn-on eyebrow at him.

“I can get you one lap dance for that,” she said. “Or that ATM can turn it into singles and you boys can sit closer to the stage.”

“One lap dance each?” Mac asked hopefully.

“No.”

“Oh,” said Mac, deflating. “In that case, I’ll—”

“Absolutely _not_ ,” said Dennis, snatching his ten dollar bill off the table and leaving just Mac’s five and collection of singles. “You’re not paying to get your dick hard with _my_ money. Thanks, but that’s all.”

The woman hummed, bored, and strode away. Mac reached across the table and slugged him hard in the shoulder.

“What the hell, dude?” Dennis said, rubbing it. That fucking hurt.

“For you being selfish.”

“Oh, excuse me for not wanting to give you strip club money when I already pay for every fucking other thing you do,” said Dennis, rolling his eyes. “Don’t be a little bitch. Let’s go turn these to ones, alright?”

But instead they used the money to buy more shots, and they moved closer to the stage and snatched up the singles Mac already had to stuff in the girls’ g-strings.

“I wonder how much you’d have to pay to see two of these girls kiss,” Dennis said idly, eyes wandering the room. “That one…and that one, I think would be good.”

“I’m sure they get up to it,” Mac said. “All these guys getting ‘em all hot out here, and if they can’t pay, they gotta take it up with each other.”

“I doubt they actually _like_ dancing on all these dudes,” Dennis said. “They’re all, like, old and ugly and shit. Except for you and me.”

“It’s just because it’s, like, four in the afternoon,” said Mac. “Come back at around midnight, I bet they’re all piss drunk and feeling each other up in the back office or something. They just lock it so nobody knows.”

He looked at Dennis, right then. There was no expression at all on his face; Dennis’s blood ran ice cold like he had denounced him personally. Their gazes only held a second before Mac looked away, tipping a beer down his throat and going back to looking at the stage.

Was he implying what he thought he was implying? Dennis wondered. He was intimately aware of just how much he’d locked the back office himself over the years, him and Charlie, and even though it wasn’t exactly _often_ it had still been somewhat regular for a handful of years now. Mac was stupid but even he couldn’t be _that_ stupid. Right?

But Mac was busy eying up one of the girls onstage, and Dennis thought that he was much more oblivious and way more irritating than that. If he knew something, there’s no way he wouldn’t have spoken up and confronted them both about it. Mac didn’t have a cross hanging around his neck, but he might as well have. If his two best friends were hooking up behind his back, Dennis wasn’t sure whether being left out of something between them or the thought of two guys together would be worse in Mac’s mind. He was sure, though, that it would result in a blowout fight. Even the smallest things did; no way something like that would pass under the radar without so much as a passing mention.

Dennis forced himself to drink more beer. He grabbed one of the singles still on the table and leaned over to tuck it into the cleavage of the girl on stage, when she leaned over and smirked at him to do it.

Mac was looking at him when he sat back.

“What?” said Dennis, some of the same icy dread from before leaking back into his blood at the thought this might not be over.

Mac shook his head.

“Wanna buy us another round?” he said, although Dennis was sure that was not what he had just been thinking. He nodded jerkily and flagged the waiter down, requesting two more beers.

They stayed at the strip club for hours, until some of the sketchy, older clientele filtered out for a slightly younger crowd. It was still a lot of forty- and fifty-somethings, though. Mac and Dennis weren’t the youngest ones there, but they were close.

“Should we text the others?” Mac asked after a while. “Charlie and Frank would probably wanna be here.”

Dennis looked at Mac for a long moment in the low light. The soft curve of his jaw, his slightly ruffled hair, his fingers tapping anxiously on the table. Dennis thought about the old promise to be better, to be normal. He thought about how he really didn’t like to share.

“Nah,” he said eventually, giving in. “They’re probably already off doing something stupid with Dee.”

Mac nodded like that made the most sense in the world and put his phone face-down on the table. Dennis stared at the hand that discarded it for a long moment before dragging his eyes back up to Mac’s face. Mac was just sitting there, watching him. Dennis thought he shouldn’t have had so much to drink.

“What?” Mac asked.

Dennis looked away and picked his beer back up.

“Nothing,” he said distantly. “Do you wanna go soon? We ran out of cash for these chicks hours ago, and my credit limit sucks.”

“Oh, but I think it’s almost late enough for theme night to start,” said Mac, looking back at the stage.

“What’s the theme?”

“American heroes,” Mac said, and his voice was hungry as he watched the girl grinding up on the pole onstage. She caught his eye and winked.

Dennis sighed. He told himself he was a sucker for women in uniform but in truth he might just have been a sucker for Mac’s smile. He got both in spades when he put another few rounds of beer on his card and a girl in a leather skirt and a sorry excuse for a cop shirt came out with a plastic gun cocked.

They stayed two more hours and then headed out. It was nearly midnight by then. They were both very drunk.

“Should we drop by Paddy’s?” Dennis said. “I feel like we were supposed to but I really wanna go home.”

“Dennis,” Mac said suddenly. He put his hand on his arm, his grip tight for balance. “Dennis. Dennis!”

“What?” he asked, wrenching his arm free.

Mac pointed limply. Dennis turned around; Mac was pointing into the depths of the strip club’s parking lot. It was dark, though, and Dennis’s vision was fuzzy when he tried to focus. He leaned in, squinting.

“What?” he said. “I don’t see anything. Just two strippers having a smoke break.”

Mac clapped his hand over his mouth, giggling.

“I bet they’re _making out_ ,” he stage-whispered. “Wanna go watch?”

“What?” said Dennis. “Dude, I can smell it. They’re smoking weed.”

“I bet they’re fooling around back there,” Mac said, still grinning. He gave a little hiccup. “Some chick is probably getting plowed in the back office by the manager, so they had to come out here for some _privacy_.”

He giggled again. Dennis squinted at him for a long moment before their conversation from earlier came back to him, and he rolled his eyes.

“Dude, they wouldn’t kiss in a fucking parking lot. That’s so obvious.”

“I don’t know about that,” Mac said, suddenly serious. Dennis startled, rearing back when Mac leaned in close. All the mirth was gone from his face, just like that. “Parking lots are a popular place for two people to wanna kiss.”

Dennis swallowed, feeling suddenly like he had a head cold. He didn’t know why, but in the fourteen years since he had kissed Mac behind the library, he had assumed that he’d either forgotten or pushed it to the back of his mind and repressed like hell. Other than the sly glances for that first couple of weeks after, Mac had never hinted that he thought about it at all. He’d never so much as suggested that he remembered it well enough to even regret it.

But now Mac was really drunk, and leaning in close to Dennis’s face with an expression so serious that it was hard to say he was talking about anything else. He was so close that he had to flick his eyes between each of Dennis’s just to look at him straight. For a breathless moment, they were so close that for the second time that week, Dennis was sure Mac was about to kiss him.

But then Mac leaned away all of a sudden. He drained the last of the beer still in his hand and smashed it against the gate that was pushed open to the parking lot, and he started walking down the street. Dennis caught up to him, still watching the side of his face for signs of — something, he didn’t know what.

Mac turned and threw him a small smile. It wasn’t strained, but there was something a little unhappy-looking about it nonetheless. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what about it made him think so.

“Let’s skip the bar, dude,” said Mac. “Let’s go home and pass the fuck out to reruns on Comedy Central.”

Dennis threw his arm around his shoulders. Mac, instead of shrugging him off like Dennis expected, leaned into his side and grinned at him wide.

 

Charlie came by while he was cooking a pot of spaghetti. He glanced over his shoulder as the door swung closed.

“Hey man,” he said. “Dinner’s almost done if you want a plate.”

“Sure,” said Charlie, shrugging a shoulder. He spread out on the couch and started channel surfing while Dennis strained the pasta out in the sink. “Where’s Mac?”

“Down at the bar. Some girl he never called back took a sledge hammer to the circuit breaker and blew all our power,” said Dennis, rolling his eyes to himself as he reached to get some plates down from the top shelf. “Frank’s got him down there fixing the mess up with him.”

“When’s he coming back?” Charlie asked.

“Probably not for a while,” said Dennis. “I saw the damage, that chick _decimated_ that thing, dude. I’ll tell you, I’m kind of impressed.”

“Yeah,” Charlie snorted. “’Cause you’re not the one who’s gonna have to get our electricity back up and running when Mac ends up screwing it up even harder.”

Dennis tipped his head to the side a little. True.

He brought two platefuls of food out into the living room, shoving Charlie away from the center of the couch to make room for himself on it too.

“Whatever, we don’t need those guys,” said Dennis. “We can do a Terminator marathon without them. Did you bring the DVDs?”

Charlie fished around in an inside pocket of his jacket and came up with them; he tossed them onto the coffee table and said, “I am so ready for _Salvation_ to come out next year, dude.”

“Why?” Dennis said flatly. “Schwarzenegger’s not even in the new one, man, so it’s gonna be total garbage.”

“Yeah, but _Christian Bale_ , dude! Batman!”

“Oh, my god.”

They bickered about the obvious merits of any plot set in the Terminator universe versus the drawbacks of missing its key star for a good twenty minutes while they finished up their dinners. They only stopped when Dennis flicked off the lights so they could settle in.

They drifted closer as the movie progressed. Charlie’s knee on his. Their shoulders brushing. When Dennis got up to put the sequel in, he sat back down right next to him in the middle of the couch.

Dennis really liked movie nights, even though he had seen this particular one too many times to count. He got a little more bored than intrigued around Sarah Connor’s nightmare about Judgment Day, and Charlie’s cheek was tilted toward his anyway, and that’s when he turned his face toward him with two fingers and kissed him.

Charlie didn’t seem surprised. There wasn’t any of the desperation that there used to be but it was a comforting and familiar warmth against him anyway. There honestly wasn’t even a whole lot of feelings there anymore at all but good kissing was good kissing. Making out with friends had the benefits that Charlie knew just how to touch him, and when he wound his arms loosely around Dennis’s neck to tug him closer, Dennis had no illusions about whose benefit it was for.

There were downsides, of course. Charlie wouldn’t want to take things further and most of the fun of making out during a movie was having sex on the couch after ten minutes or so. Dennis was already twitching for something but he forced himself to calm down.

Like he could sense it, Charlie tugged a little on his hair to give him a little extra. At least he never apologized for never wanting to do anything more than kiss — Dennis could appreciate that.

He thumbed across Charlie’s cheek. Charlie pulled him closer and he swayed, off-balance. Tentatively, he started to rest his hand on Charlie’s thigh to steady himself but when Charlie tensed slightly against him, Dennis flattened his hand against the couch beside his back instead. The motion made him have to loom over him more, but Charlie didn’t seem to mind being pressed a little into the couch. He smoothed his hands through Dennis’s hair, ruffling it up a bit. Then he slid his hands down to Dennis’s sides, scrunching his shirt up around his ribs and then slipping them up underneath it against hot bare skin.

The ending of Terminator 2 was still playing on the TV in the background, filtering them in yellow light and the loud music of an action scene. Dennis tipped Charlie’s head back with a hand in his hair, and because he wasn’t using that arm to balance on the couch anymore, he slung his knee over Charlie’s lap and settled back into it. Charlie touched his waist and tilted his head back up to kiss him more easily. When Dennis rolled his hips, just because the tension built up and he couldn’t help it, Charlie tightened his grip on his jeans and just let him.

They made out like that, soft and easy, until the movie ended. The credits rolled. Dennis kept his eyes closed for a moment after Charlie pulled his mouth away, and only opened them when Charlie pressed his mouth gently to Dennis’s neck and then nudged him out of his lap so he could get up. He ejected the movie out of the DVD player and popped in the third one. Dennis was sitting back, arms splayed across the back of the couch, when Charlie settled back into the seat beside him. He wasn’t quite leaning into Dennis’s side, but he seemed to be shifted toward him more than necessary. Dennis brushed a hand through his hair.

Dennis liked him a lot but maybe not the same way as he used to, he thought. Charlie didn’t want to lean into him while they watched TV and he always talked about how kissing was gross and banging made his skin crawl. He didn’t want Charlie to kiss him when he was bored just to humor him. And he didn’t want to always fool around just to get wound up and have to go out and fuck somebody else.

“It’s not the same anymore,” he said, “is it?”

He was looking at the TV and so was Charlie but they both knew what he was talking about, no matter how mild he sounded.

Charlie just said, “Yeah.”

Dennis hummed softly and tousled more of his hair between his fingers before settling his arm back around him. They stayed like that until Mac came home an hour or so later. Dennis quickly withdrew his arm when he heard the doorknob turning, then Mac was barging loudly through the door just like he always did.

“ _Fuck_ women!” he said loudly. “I hate them! Dennis, I goddamn hate women! Hey, Charlie.”

He shrugged off his jacket and set it aggressively on one of the hooks near the door. Dennis’s fingers twitched together where his hands were clasped in his lap.

“Hey, Mac,” said Charlie. “Are our lights back on?”

“No,” said Mac bitterly. “You need to fix that shit with Frank in the morning. I don’t know how the hell you get all those stupid wires to work together. If they’re all black, how do you know which one to connect to the others?”

Charlie rolled his eyes, setting his hands on his thighs to help leverage himself up from the couch.

“Okay, settle down,” he said, going over to Mac and clapping him on the shoulder. “I’ll handle it, bro. I’m gonna head out, guys, it’s really late. Mac, there’s thirty minutes left on Rise of the Machines if you wanna stay up with Dennis.”

Dennis waved vaguely from the couch. Charlie grabbed his jacket and pulled his arms through it.

“See you tomorrow,” said Mac, high-fiving him in farewell as he passed to throw himself into the vacated seat beside Dennis on the couch.

“Later,” said Charlie. His eyes were on Dennis.

“See you,” said Dennis.

They looked at each other for a second.

“Bye,” said Charlie, and he disappeared out the door.

Dennis looked after him for a couple of seconds before Mac nudged him with his elbow and threw his arm out across the back of couch behind Dennis’s head.

“Dude, Schwarzenegger is shredded,” he said appreciatively. He reached for one of the noodles left on Dennis’s discarded plate. “Is this spaghetti cold? Whatever.”

Dennis watched him dropping it into his mouth for a second before he snorted and looked away. Mac grinned at him.

“How was the first two Terminators?” Mac asked.

Dennis smiled a little, eyes still on the screen.

“It was good, Mac,” he said. Quietly, he added, “It was really good.”

 

Mac’s voice, over the walkie talkie: “If we’re gonna do this, the only way it’s gonna work is if you’re dressed like a man.”

Dennis paused. Charlie turned to look at him.

Mac’s voice, continuing: “From here on out, I’m gonna refer to you only as Dennis. When we slip in, you’re gonna start banging me. _Hard_.”

“Well,” said Charlie, looking up at him, “Mac’s gay.”

Dennis’s heart was in his goddamn throat.

“He wants to impress us because he’s in _love_ with us,” Dennis said. Said it like a throwaway theory. Gauge Charlie’s reaction, see if he was just projecting or if there was really something there to be considered.

“Oh my god, he’s _so_ in love with us,” said Charlie, and maybe it really was that simple but maybe it wasn’t. Dennis was starting to think it didn’t matter one way or the other.

Mac might love him, Mac might not. Mac might have been gay all along.

That question — that and the one stupid thought he’d had just once, nearly twenty years ago. They were running around in his head. Mac might like guys but he’d never admit it, not to himself or anyone else, not in a million years. So it shouldn’t matter.

Stupid fucking bullshit. It always mattered.

Dennis didn’t stop wondering about it all day.

 

It was familiar, the warm solid weight of Charlie lying on top of him in Charlie’s bed. Charlie’s breath by his ear. Charlie’s hands by his sides.

Things that weren’t familiar: The blankets pulled over their heads. The uncomfortable press of Charlie’s body when he wasn’t trying to hold himself up a little. Mac, barging in saying, “Yeah, I would never say it to his face, but Dennis has great thighs.”

The waitress saying, “You look pretty busted,” like it wasn’t even a surprise to see the two of them twisted up together in bed.

Dennis getting up in Mac’s face, saying, “Coming in here, talking about how in love with my thighs you are!” with nearly as much venom as there was accusation. Things he never would have dared to think, thrown out into the light.

Mac saying, “Were you guys humping in the bed?” with that stupid morbid curiosity he always had about shit like that. His youth pastor all over again. Mac would never admit it but Dennis would never stop wondering if Mac was still thinking about it. About him, like that. With a man.

The waitress left and they all made up but Dennis was thinking about it, still. All day he was thinking about it. He was starting to feel like he would never have another thought ever again.

 

Dennis wasn’t the only one who noticed. Maybe Charlie was always the perceptive one after all; God knew how many years he’d had it clocked and just never said anything, for whatever reason. Or maybe he hadn’t noticed before and he was still just being agreeable now. Dennis never really knew why Charlie did or didn’t do anything.

“Hey man,” he said, leaning over to Dennis where they were sitting out front in their lawn chairs, watching Mac fall from the roof in the name of badassery. “Do you still get the feeling he wants to bang us?”

And maybe Dennis was still projecting when he agreed, but at least — at _least_ — he wasn’t entirely alone in thinking that the tides, for the first time, were turning.

 

Mac had been watching his sex tapes. It took him three weeks to give in after Mac said he hated the angle, but Dennis set it up on top of his dresser instead. The next girl he brought home, he made her go down on him in front of the dresser so she disappeared from the camera’s view, and he winked and smiled at the lens the whole time.

When he checked his drawer a couple days later, that tape was slipped in out of place, swapped with the one right next to it. Dennis set them right and smiled a little to himself as he shut the drawer.

 

He was curled up on his bed again. Nothing new. Mac brought him soup and water and sat down on the edge of his mattress.

“You don’t feel like you have a fever,” Mac said curiously, pulling his hand away. “What’s up with you? You’ve been in bed for like two days.”

“I’m fine,” Dennis said shortly, turning onto his other side so he didn’t have to look at him. “Go away.”

Mac hesitated for a second before he did as he was told. Once the door was safely shut, Dennis reached up and tugged hard on his hair. This was so goddamn senseless. Nothing had even _happened_ , he just woke up yesterday morning and felt like a huge anchor had been dropped on his chest. Getting up once for food that day had been so tiring that he’d put it off for three hours and then laid back in bed immediately after. He’d spent most of last night crying and _nothing was even wrong_.

He pulled the sheets up over himself.

“Mac?” he called.

Mac was back in under a minute, peering through the doorway into the dark. Dennis looked over his shoulder at him for a moment before lying back down, facing the wall.

“What’s up, man?” he said. “You need more Advil?”

The meds he’d brought Dennis before were still untouched on the bedside table, though, because a fever wasn’t why his skin was crawling.

“If you’re just going to sit out there and worry for the whole goddamn night,” Dennis said, heaving a huge sigh, “then just stay in here. I don’t need you popping in all night to check on me when I’m trying to sleep.”

Mac didn’t say anything. He stayed there for a moment, not moving. Dennis could feel eyes on his back.

He left the door open as he finally came into the room and laid down on the other side of the mattress; Dennis had to roll over again to keep facing away from him, and the effort it took felt gargantuan and exhausting. After a few minutes, the sheets rustled as Mac slipped between them and then he reached out to touch Dennis’s side, and Dennis let him press up against his back. Mac didn’t say anything when he started to shake, just squeezed him a little tighter. Dennis laid awake for a while.

He had had all his Mac Feelings bundled up and locked away in a drawer, but it seemed that somehow, Mac had found the key and now he was just rifling through the pages, searching out the best file to throw up in the air to scatter all around the floor. Even if Dennis managed to get him away from it, some of those pages were probably already dog-eared and torn beyond repair.

He listened to Mac’s sleep-evened breathing and wished he could figure out how to light the whole goddamn drawer, and maybe the rest of his brain as well for good measure, up in flames.

 

Dennis was pretty sure that he was two steps away from a heart attack, one way or another. Charlie was putting on the most ridiculous goddamn play in the entire world. He was playing a little boy that was supposed to be in love with a woman played by his fucking sister. And Mac wouldn’t stop talking about the best way for them to sleep together.

This was getting totally out of control.

“What if I were to position him in a way where I get behind him?” Mac said, turning him around by the shoulders. Maybe he should have fought it more for show but his mind snagged on the image of what he was saying and he just smiled a little helplessly and let Mac manhandle him. _Get behind him_. “And then Frank could throw that blanket that he’s got right there over us, and then that way you can’t see the penetration.”

He pressed his hips forward right up against Dennis’s ass, his arms caging him in all around his shoulders. When Mac sat back a little on his haunches, Dennis automatically leaned back into the cradle of his hips. Just to keep the show going, he told himself. Whatever.

“That’s a good idea,” he said. He made the mistake of looking up at Mac, who was just hovering close over him. Mac’s mouth was _inches_ from his own. “You know what, Charlie? Because the blanket will make the raping…I’m sorry, the sexing from behind feel more classy.”

Frank threw the blanket over them both. It was too hot, with them all pressed together and the thick, heavy blanket now weighted to the bed with them too.

“That’s good,” Mac agreed, smoothing the blanket out and then wrapping his arm closer back around Dennis’s chest. “And then what I can do is thrust this way — and you can struggle.”

He did, before he was even done talking. Dennis jolted forward with the sudden, unexpected force of his hips moving against him, his mouth hung open while he just stared up at Charlie dizzily. God, looking at Charlie had been a mistake too, because he could still remember the not-so-distant feeling of Charlie’s weight on him instead and the slick slide of their mouths together and it was a _mistake_ , goddamn it, to think about kissing guys when Mac was still right up on his ass. There was nowhere safe at all to look. How in God’s name was this fucking _happening_? Dennis was now maybe one step away from that heart attack he’d been close to earlier.

“Now I’m here, okay?” Charlie said, voice shaking in intensity as he raised his hands far above his head. “I am — I’m past where I thought I could go. I’m, like, all the way up _here_ with it.”

They just stared up at him, neither one moving. Then Mac gave another little aborted thrust against him, almost like he was wondering if Charlie was sure it wasn’t a good idea. Charlie gave a little scream.

“I can’t be around you when you’re screwing things up like this!” he said, beginning to storm away. He paused to look back at them, holding out a shaking hand. “Don’t — don’t you guys screw this up for me. Don’t do it. Don’t you even think about—”

His hand clenched suddenly into a fist and he stopped with a little choking sound. Without saying anything else he stormed offstage. Mac and Dennis looked at each other.

“I think we had something,” Dennis said. “We had something with, you know, classing it up like we did.”

“Totally, man, totally.” Mac dipped his head in a fast nod. “We should take it from the top.”

His voice shrunk a little on the end, making it a question, asking for approval. Dennis’s heart was beating harder and he should have said no but he just — didn’t want to. He should have, and could have, but didn’t.

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah. Okay. Alright. You’ll fire—”

He didn’t get to finish the rest of the thought. Mac flattened a hand on his shoulder, the other fastened around the top of his jeans to keep him steady while he started to jerk his hips hard against him. Dennis broke off with a choking noise, defenseless against letting it out. He reached back automatically to touch Mac’s hip. His head was spinning and Mac was just lying over him, rocking his hips _hard_. This was getting _way_ too out of control. He couldn’t think — and Artemis and Frank were still right there — they could _hear_ him — he moved to elbow Mac back away from him but before he made contact with his chest, Mac paused in his motions. His hand disappeared from Dennis’s shoulder, and Dennis hesitated right before pushing him off, assuming he was done.

Bigger mistake. Mac only reached up and grabbed a thick handful of his hair, and he pulled it back so hard that Dennis’s neck arched all the way back. Mac was already starting to jerk his hips against him again, as hard as before. Dennis shuddered with him. It was impossible not to think about it. About Mac throwing him down and manhandling him for real, and Dennis’s brain short-circuited as they jostled and moved, pulled together as they were. The box they were on creaked with how forcefully Mac was driving up on him.

Dennis finally formed a coherent enough thought to shove him back with his still-aloft elbow. Mac sat back immediately, watching him curiously and smoothing his hands down his thighs.

“What?” he said. “I think we’ve got it down.”

Dennis swallowed.

“Listen, man,” he said, injecting as much aggression as he could into his voice. “I don’t want you fucking me from behind unless Charlie watches.”

Terrible wording, he thought furiously. He should rephrase. But Mac just tongued at his cheek and said, “Okay, dude. Fair enough.”

And he slung the blanket over his shoulders, climbed off the box they were using as a prop bed, and wandered off after Charlie backstage. Dennis pushed himself up on one shaky arm. Artemis wasn’t paying him any attention, flipping through the script and muttering to herself. Frank met his eye and passively started biting at one of his fingernails.

“What the hell are you looking at?” Dennis snapped.

Frank just stared blankly at him for another couple of seconds. Then he said, sounding almost bored, “You wanna go get a sandwich?”

Dennis made a thick, disgusted noise and climbed off the makeshift bed. He started to go backstage, remembered who exactly was waiting back there, and went to throw himself in one of the chairs in the audience instead to pout until Charlie came back to run more scenes.

The night of the play came quickly. Charlie was strung up tight, even though everyone had agreed to do the play like he wanted. Dee swore she wouldn’t object to her song anymore; they’d agreed to eighty six the dry humping and stick to the fade-to-black angle.

Of course they were all lying. Dee bombed her way through a song promising she didn’t like kids and even after Frank threw the blanket over them and the lights faded out, Mac still shook the bed with how hard he was pretending to fuck him.

The play ended, Charlie got rejected by the waitress, and they all went home. Dennis got stuck at the third red light in a row, and he tapped anxiously at the steering wheel while he waited for the light to turn. His blood was humming and he didn’t like being stopped. Too much room to think.

Mac had been hard, back there on stage. Okay, he could process this rationally. Mac had been hard just from being on top of him in the dark and when Dennis tried to bring him back to some semblance of reality, Mac had just snapped, “Shut up, dude! Don’t ruin this for me!” and kept going.

How often, Dennis wondered. How often did Mac think about them like that that it was something that could be ruined? And of course, that sickly fascinating question would be nothing if not accompanied by the persistent, nagging doubt that he had got this all wrong and there was something he was missing. Some key information that would mean he was, just like always and as he’d been proven time and time again, left alone in the dark. It was that doubt that always made him hold his tongue.

Mac was leaned back in the passenger seat, humming idly along to the radio and picking at his nails. Dennis had the ghost of the feeling of him, hard and fitted up against his ass, stuck on his skin like they were still pressed chest-to-chest on that big dark stage.

Mac turned the dial down on the radio and looked over at him.

“You wanna order a pizza?” Mac said.

Dennis showered, scalding and long, when they got home. He was scrubbing at his skin when Mac called for delivery and by the time the knock came on the door, Mac had changed into sweatpants with no shirt, his stage makeup all washed off, and Dennis was sitting with him on the couch wondering if he shouldn’t have taken a cold shower instead after all.

“I’ll get the door,” Dennis said, jumping up from his seat.

“I’ll get plates,” Mac offered, standing too.

“Grab the pepper while you’re in there, bro,” Dennis said over his shoulder. “This shit never has enough kick.”

He stiffed the delivery boy on the tip and slammed the door shut on his face, pizza successfully achieved. He held it up over his head triumphantly while Mac set plates and two glasses of water down on the table.

“Play went good, huh?” Mac said cheerfully as they started to eat. “I mean, _I_ sounded great.”

Dennis glanced up at him and snorted. He shook his head as he went back to eating.

“What are you trying to say?” Mac said, instantly at maximum aggression at the slightest hint of teasing. “I _did_ do great. I acted the shit out of that part.”

“Not the only thing you gave your all,” Dennis muttered.

“What?”

Mac was glaring at him. Dennis arched an eyebrow at him across the table for a second before he went back to his food.

“You tried to slam ass like it was an audition for a porno, that’s what,” said Dennis offhandedly.

He looked up and met his eye. Mac sat back, mouth open a little. Dennis grinned. Color rapidly came back to Mac’s cheeks — a red, furious flush crawling its way up his face.

“I don’t — That wasn’t — Don’t twist this around on me, that wasn’t what you think it was—”

Dennis took a big bite out of the slice of pizza he was holding, the picture of nonchalance. Deflect, deflect. If something was more true about Mac then it would cancel out some of what Dennis didn’t want true about himself, right?

“Whatever, man,” he said.

“It _wasn’t_ ,” Mac insisted.

He was getting angry now. He shoved his chair back and stood up fast, towering and posturing in equal measure. Dennis put his pizza down and leaned back in his seat, laughing.

“It totally was,” he said. “But that’s okay, dude. I get it. I mean, look at me.”

He gestured vaguely up and down his body. Mac was still glaring but he looked at where Dennis pointed anyway. His chest, his arms, his face.

“I was _acting_ ,” Mac said fretfully, worrying the inside of his cheek. “I wasn’t—”

“You got hard right on top of me,” Dennis said, finally standing too. Mac was getting closer and he didn’t want to let him keep the height advantage. “I think I can tell when some guy’s hard right on top of me.”

“I’m — a method actor—” Mac stammered. “I was getting into character and—”

“You’re not a method actor because you’re not _an_ actor,” Dennis said. Mac was beet red and Dennis was openly laughing at him now. He poked Mac in the chest with a finger. “You’re just some guy who popped a boner from grinding on his friend. His friend who’s _also_ a man, I might add.”

“Shut up. I’m warning you, Dennis.”

Dennis leaned his face in closer. Mac’s hands were fists at his sides.

“Were you hard, Mac?” he whispered, still grinning. “Did you get fucking hard? From laying on top of me, and pretending to fuck me?”

There was a little pause. Something shifted in Mac’s expression but it was hard to tell what; he still looked angry, and he was still bright red. But something undefinable shifted and Dennis didn’t like it. He suddenly hoped that Mac would just rear back and punch him in the face.

“You think I don’t notice, but I do,” Mac spat. It was so apart from the reaction Dennis was expecting that he pulled back a little, forehead pinching. “I fucking notice. Of course I do! How the hell could I not?”

“Notice what?” Dennis said, a little defensive on instinct.

Now Mac was the one to lean into _his_ space.

“At least my thing happened in the dark,” he said. “But when I pulled your hair in rehearsal, you _liked_ it. Frank and Artemis and everyone was right there but _you_ were the one sounding like you wanted more. You know what I think?”

Dennis ground his teeth, jaw flexing. He could feel the tendons in his neck standing out, stark and tense.

“What?” he bit out.

“I don’t think you’re pissed at me,” said Mac. His focus landed on Dennis’s mouth and dragged, long and slow, all the way up to meet his eyes. “Say whatever you want, I don’t believe you.”

Dennis _did_ hate him a little, he thought. But that wasn’t really what he was thinking about, for the most part.

He was mostly thinking that he could remember every time Mac smiled at him, and how Mac lit up when Dennis called him _baby_ , and how he used to shake when they were kids and Dennis held him while his parents fought so loudly they could hear it through the walls. He thought about Mac looking at him sometimes in a way he probably wouldn’t if he ever noticed it himself, and about how Mac leaned into his side when he slung an arm around his shoulders, and how Mac had a sixth sense for guessing what alcohol Dennis was in the mood for at night. All the times they’d pushed into each other’s spaces and Dennis thought, maybe now was when they did something stupid. And Mac’s smile here, thinking he’d won. Thinking he’d shocked or shamed or belittled Dennis into silence.

Dennis was fucking _tired_. His entire body was buzzing and as much as he searched, he didn’t have a damn thought past Mac looking at him. Everything beyond that seemed cloaked in a gray fog.

He stalked a little closer, eyes fixed on his, and Mac’s hard expression faded into an unreadable, almost scared mask. He leaned back against the dinner table, fingers curling over the edge of it, as Dennis got right up in his space.

“You don’t know anything _about_ me,” Dennis hissed.

His raised his hands, and Mac flinched like he was going to hit him. It was probably worse that they landed on Mac’s chest instead, then slid slowly down to his stomach; Mac swallowed, watching them move down his body until they paused and Dennis leaned his face in closer. They were bare inches apart and he whispered, harsh and cold, “Is this what you wanted, Mac?” He didn’t have a shirt to bunch up in his fists so Dennis pulled them back, his whole body trembling. “You want me like this?”

Mac’s breathing was shaky. “No.”

Dennis studied his face for a moment, and then it seemed that Mac was no longer breathing at all.

“You’re lying,” Dennis said softly. Mac looked stonily back at him and said nothing.

Dennis glanced from Mac’s mouth back up to his eyes and something shifted, not meanly like before but like he knew it. Like he knew it right exactly when Dennis did that Dennis was going to reach to cradle his face and pull him hard into him, and Mac’s hands were already spreading out across Dennis’s back when they kissed.

They swayed and stumbled in their desperate haste to immediately consume each other as wholly as possible. Mac’s hands settled, big and warm, around his sides near the bottom of his ribs. Dennis curled his fingers through Mac’s hair, not tugging but just keeping him anchored close. Their lips slid and shifted together until Dennis got Mac backed up against the wall beside the kitchen and kissed his way across his neck. Hot presses of his mouth until he paused, nosing at his throat while he caught his breath. Mac tipped his face back up with one knuckle and rubbed his thumb against his chin as their tongues met.

Dennis slid his palms down his bare chest again and curled his index fingers into the tops of Mac’s sweats. Not pulling him nearer or moving to push them down. Just holding him close. His knuckles were brushing Mac’s bare waist and he was warm, his skin running hot beneath Dennis’s touch. He didn’t know why but it was all he could think about: How warm he was at the intimate places Dennis was touching.

“You like this?” Dennis panted. It was meant to be another biting tease but it didn’t really come out sounding that way.

“Shut the hell up, man,” said Mac, ducking to kiss him again, and it was harder than before.

Dennis laughed, not nicely, against his mouth and Mac pressed his lips to Dennis’s throat. His beard was scraping him up and it kind of hurt, but Dennis just arched closer to him on a gasp and squeezed his ass hard. Mac shifted a little away from the wall to make room for his roaming hands.

It was fucking dizzying, and not just because they weren’t pausing much to breathe. Dennis didn’t even have room enough to wonder if he was making the biggest fucking mistake of his life because he was blindly following that raw _want_ he’d always had down a rabbit hole, and Mac was plunging right along with him down through the dark. There wasn’t room to think about much of anything besides how best to make Mac moan next.

Mac bit down on a tendon and Dennis grabbed the sides of his face hard, pulling him up to look him in the eye.

“This never happened,” Dennis breathed.

“It’s not happening now,” Mac promised.

Mac kissed him again and Dennis’s heart was pounding and he wanted to ask how long Mac had been wanting something like this. He wasn’t sure, though, whether it would be better or worse if he’d been wanting as long as Dennis had himself.

Mac’s hands were gentler than Dennis knew they could be. Mac had hit him before; they had wrestled nearly all their lives. But his touch was soft when he spread his palms against Dennis’s jaw and then over his shoulders. Dennis fumbled to untie the strings on Mac’s sweats and they paused in kissing to laugh, breathless and giddy. Mac kissed him again, once, twice, and then pulled away to rustle a hand back through his hair.

“My room,” Mac said.

“No, my room,” Dennis breathed. Mac looked at him. He explained, “Bigger bed and no Holy Mary or whoever the fuck looking down on me.”

“Mine’s closer,” Mac said.

“Not asking,” said Dennis, and Mac bickered about the importance of his religious paraphernalia all the way across the apartment and down onto Dennis’s bed. “Shut up about Jesus, _Christ_.”

“Blow me,” Mac said, rolling his eyes.

Dennis smoothed a hand through Mac’s hair, contemplating the sweat starting to bead at his forehead and his pouting bottom lip and his flushed cheeks. Mac swallowed and Dennis followed the movement of his Adam’s apple and looked back at his wide eyes, big and shiny in the dark.

“Don’t tempt me.”

Mac shivered when Dennis kissed him. His hands went back to his sweats.  He moved onto his back and Mac hunkered down over him, knees on either side of his hips. Dennis slipped his hands down the back of his sweats and grabbed hard at his ass again, thrilled at touching him bare this time. Mac made a shocked, choked sound and Dennis grinned against his jaw while he pulled Mac’s hips down to his. They both groaned. Mac rocked down onto Dennis’s lap like he couldn’t help it.

It was good, Dennis thought, head spinning. He had barely thought about wanting Mac in such defined, overt ways but even when he lost that battle in the dim, faded regions of back of his head or when he couldn’t help it in dreams, he still hadn’t gotten it right. The reality of Mac in his bed, touching him and moaning softly by his ear when Dennis rocked up against him, was so much sweeter whether he liked it or not. And Dennis definitely didn’t fucking like it.

But he weaved his fingers through Mac’s hair and kept Mac’s mouth against his. Mac was thumbing at his cheeks and panting and it was so hot pressed together on his sheets but this time Dennis didn’t have to push Mac away by the chest and fight about which one of them was hard when they shouldn’t have been. This time he rolled Mac over onto his back and pulled his sweats halfway down his thighs and jerked him off fast and hot, spit-slicked hand down between his legs and his attention on Mac’s face. Mac’s eyes scrunched shut, his breathing labored. Sometimes Dennis leaned down and kissed his parted mouth, but mostly he just laid there beside him, occasionally swooping in to bite and lick idly across his chest. One of his legs was wrapped over Mac’s, ankle hooking in around his calf, and he felt it when Mac shuddered.

He thought that he might never get sick of lying there like that with him, and he wondered, a little alarmed, why the hell he would be so content to give instead of get for that long. But after a second, he pushed the concern away and just focused on committing his every move and noise to memory, until Mac’s whole body went tense and he pulled Dennis roughly by the hair so he could kiss him hard as he came.

Mac unwound slowly, spread out on the bed. He was panting hard. Dennis wiped his hand almost all the way clean on the sheets and licked off the last of it; Mac didn’t say anything but he was watching him the whole time.

“This isn’t your first time,” he said, still sounding winded. It wasn’t a question.

Dennis just looked at him. No need to answer what hadn’t been asked. After a moment, Mac released his hold on Dennis’s hair and pulled his sweats back up, and then he sat up and pulled Dennis up too so he could kiss him again.

Dennis sat between his legs, knees over Mac’s thighs and legs wrapped loosely around his waist, and they made out lazily while Mac got him off too. Dennis bit down hard on the meaty part where Mac’s neck ended when he climaxed, losing a fight with the high keen that left him when he did. He sat there for a few minutes after, forehead on Mac’s shoulder and his hands running light and pointless up and down Mac’s arms. From here, he could see some of the freckles dotting Mac’s shoulders and down the top of his back. Mac traced senseless designs across Dennis’s spine.

Eventually, when both their hearts were beating at their normal paces again, they peeled apart. They just looked at each other for a moment, faces half-invisible with shadows. The first thing either of them said was when Dennis whispered goodnight and Mac turned around in the doorway.

He hesitated a moment, then said, “I’ll cook breakfast in the morning if you put on the coffee,” and Dennis nodded a little and Mac left to go back to his own room. Dennis pulled his boxers back up and fell back on the mattress when he was gone, mind reeling in a good way as he lay alone in the dark. The physical sensation of Mac pressing into his skin was as clear as if it was still happening, and Dennis knew the feeling wouldn’t go away anytime soon. He leaned into it hazily.

Talk about the biggest dive he could have possibly made off the deep end of good behavior into a cesspool of slip-ups and all that abnormality he had wanted so desperately to avoid. That image of himself as perfect — the perfect man, right down to the beautiful wife on his arm and the rugrats he didn’t even want running around at his feet, his body toned to precision, all his ugly thoughts and impulses under control — swirled away from him and he was just left with all the parts of him that wouldn’t quite squeeze into that one, shining picture.

And so much for getting better tomorrow. It wasn’t even a question in his mind that he was going to chase after that sweet, hot taste of Mac in his bed again soon. He had tried every drug in the book: cigarettes, alcohol, weed, crack cocaine, uppers and downers and study drugs and hallucinogens. Dennis knew addiction when he put it on his tongue.

He smiled at the ceiling and then rolled over into his pillow, closing his eyes. Things were still spinning fast away from his control, of course, and something would have to be done about that soon. The drawer in the back of his head with all of his sealed away, caution-taped capital Feelings was pulled wide open and left a mess all over the floor.

But Dennis breathed, heaving and deep, as the smile drifted cleanly away and he settled in to sleep. He was comfortable and warm and satisfied. He figured that he could probably stand to wait until morning to start searching for that missing broken lock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ch title from "back to you" by selena gomez. and the hair-pulling in nightman cometh was tragically real: [chokes from hard pounding.gif](https://glirsty.tumblr.com/post/165675179799) (whoever wrote that is my god)
> 
> due to Things, i probably won't update until after the season ends (unless i end up splitting next ch into two parts, which if it strays out of my control like this ch did, i might)
> 
>  [meet me in hell @ lesbianfreyja](http://lesbianfreyja.tumblr.com/post/178516974385)


	3. i love you like an alcoholic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dennis and Mac were glued to each other’s side most of the time nowadays. Dennis spent all day with him at the bar or trying to pull off mostly-failed schemes, and then they went back home together. Usually they kept drinking, and usually one of them put their hands on the other somewhere just short of appropriate and they ended up clumsily, desperately pulling off each other’s clothes and scrambling to get each other off. Half the time, they got impatient before they made it to one of their rooms and they ended up just pressed up against the wall or fumbling down to the couch or floor. They never directly talked about what they were doing but they couldn’t get enough of it, either.
> 
> He felt like he could ride this high forever, and for the first time it seemed like he might just be able to keep exactly what he wanted.
> 
> Yeah. He really should have known better.
> 
> (aka they were banging in season 5)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for mac's usual internalized homophobia bullshit. this whole chapter is basically just a rlly long version of [izzy's woke-ass take](https://macscharlies.tumblr.com/post/171486403114/my-take-on-the-mac-and-dennis-were-banging-in). macdennis truly are the dumbest bitches alive
> 
> some good macdennis tracks for the mood: religion by lana del rey, sleeping with a friend by neon trees, turn by the wombats, bodys by car seat headrest, the kids aren't alright by fall out boy

**2009-2010**

 

He felt like he could ride this high forever, and for the first time it seemed like he might just be able to keep exactly what he wanted.

He and Mac were glued to each other’s side most of the time nowadays. Dennis spent all day with him at the bar or trying to pull off mostly-failed schemes, and then they went back home together. Usually they kept drinking, and usually one of them put their hands on the other somewhere just short of appropriate and they ended up clumsily, desperately pulling off each other’s clothes and scrambling to get each other off. Half the time, they got impatient before they made it to one of their rooms and they ended up just pressed up against the wall or fumbling down to the couch or floor. They never directly talked about what they were doing but they couldn’t get enough of it, either.

Probably that was why Mac had plastered himself to Dennis’s back while he was trying to cook dinner. His hands were hot, slipping across the back of Dennis’s thighs and up over his ass, squeezing and roaming nonstop. He had his mouth pressed to the back of Dennis’s neck, hot breath fanning out across what little skin it could reach beneath his t-shirt.

“Mac, come on.” He laughed a little, elbowing at him but not very hard.

“What?”

“I’m trying to cook, man.”

“I’m not that hungry.” Mac slid one of his hands around to squeeze Dennis’s dick through his jeans. Dennis let his thighs fall apart a little. “Don’t need to cook if I’m not hungry.”

“Sometimes people actually make dinner because they themselves are hungry,” Dennis said mildly. “Not everything’s about you. I noticed you didn’t ask if you could eat any of what I was making, by the way. Just went right on and assumed I’d give you some.”

Mac sighed. “Can I have some?”

Dennis tilted his head back onto Mac’s shoulder for a microsecond.

“Maybe.”

“Okay, great,” said Mac. He tugged on Dennis’s hips, pulling him back against his body so he could grind against his ass. He was really more rutting than anything else, like a total asshole. Dennis rocked back into the cradle of his hips just a little. “Come on, let’s go to my room. I’m horny.”

“Yeah, buddy, that’s real apparent to me right now. What with how you’re rubbing up on me like a little kid who just saw his first naked breast.”

He reached back and patted Mac’s hip. He let his hand linger, giving him a little reassuring squeeze, before he went back to stirring the noodles boiling in the pot. Mac wasn’t deterred at all, barely even paused before he went back to feeling him up. He was halfway to scratching hot fingers up Dennis’s shirt when Dennis put the ladle down and turned around under his touch. He pulled Mac closer with a hand on each side of his face and kissed him, hard at first, then softer as he pulled him in for shorter and shorter meetings of their mouths. Dennis pulled back, brushing their noses together and almost, but not quite, kissing him again.

He pulled back after a second to look Mac in the eye. Mac was never very good at hiding anything he was feeling and now he was just watching him with wide eyes and his mouth pink and hanging open.

“Let me cook,” Dennis said. Mac moved to kiss him again but Dennis pushed him back with a hand on his chest, grinning. “I’m hungry, dude! Let me have dinner first and then we can get up to whatever it is you want to get up to.”

He let Mac curve closer to him, let Mac drag him into another kiss just because he hauled Dennis against him by a handful of his ass and it felt good.

“You were pissing me off at the bar earlier,” Mac grumbled into his neck.

“Oh yeah?” Dennis tipped his head back. “And what exactly do you think I did?”

“Come on. Ignoring me all night?”

“I was working an angle with that girl.”

“I needed help behind the bar.”

Dennis looped his fingers through two of his belt loops. He bit back the retort that Mac wasn’t pissed off, he just didn’t like being teased and he didn’t like feeling jealous.

“Like most things, that also wasn’t about you,” Dennis said instead.

“Doesn’t matter. Same thing,” he said. “Wanna have angry sex anyway.”

“I’ll bet you do, big boy.”

With the flush high on his cheeks, he looked totally fucking ravishing. Literally Dennis kind of wanted to say screw it to dinner too and just lay him out on the table instead, but his stomach was hurting from how long it had been since he ate. Still, Dennis rocked his hips against Mac’s — Mac was already hard, _typical_ , he was so easy to get going — but for less than a minute before he pried himself out of his arms and leaned back against the counter, watching him.

Mac looked him over like he was contemplating the best meal of his life. Dennis swiped the back of his hand loosely over his bottom lip and chin, breathing a little harder than he wanted.

“Dinner first, though,” he said firmly.

Mac just looked at him, panting like a goddamn animal, for so long that Dennis snorted and turned back around to resume cooking without waiting for an answer. It wasn’t really a question anyway.

“You’re not the boss of me,” Mac muttered behind him.

But he did slouch away into the living room, snatching a discarded beer off the coffee table and kicking up his feet when he sat down. Dennis glanced over his shoulder at him. Mac glared at him, and Dennis just looked until Mac rolled his eyes and waved at him to go back to cooking. Dennis shook his head, smiling a little as he turned around.

God. If Mac was an idiot, which he was — and Dennis was going to bang the hell out of him later, which he also was — then what did that say about either of them, he didn’t want to know.

Worse, he didn’t even really care.

 

Mac tugged Dennis’s belt out of his jeans and laughed, his teeth wet against Dennis’s jaw where his mouth was pressed. He looked up into Dennis’s face, delighted when his attention snagged just below Dennis’s left eye.

“You gotta be faster than that,” he said, as his fingers sped to pull Dennis’s shirt out the back of his pants and he spread his hand out against his back. “You’re gonna keep getting black eyes if you can’t hit what Charlie’s pitching.”

“Maybe Charlie should start throwing his pitches _for_ the batter instead of _at_ them,” Dennis said gruffly.

Baseball had turned into Charlie playing medic turned into the pain in his face lessening significantly when he caught Mac dumping his water bottle over his head on the field. Mac had initially seemed a little confused that Dennis was hot for it at a time like that but Dennis hastening to get Mac’s shirt off before they even got in the car — “So you don’t ruin my seats,” he insisted, “ _obviously_ ,” despite how often he also went on and on about how the Range Rover was a totally sweet amphibious exploring vehicle — certainly got him on board, and now here they were, Dennis curling his fingers into Mac’s belt and starting to tug him back toward his room. Mac worked his jeans undone and was starting to slip his fingers underneath, when Dennis got him about halfway through the door and Mac put his hands on his chest and leaned back.

“Wait, wait,” he mumbled, extricating himself at least partially from Dennis’s grasping hands, but he didn’t go far. He rarely did.

“What?” Dennis sighed.

“Can’t we go to my room, dude?”

He sounded almost — pleading, in a weirdly desperate key. Dennis studied his expression curiously. Mac bit his lip and looked away from his searching gaze.

“Why do you always ask that?” Dennis asked, eyes narrowing. “My bed is bigger and more comfortable, and it doesn’t, like, _matter_.”

“Then why won’t you just come to my room?” Mac challenged him.

“Because I’m just wondering why you _care_ ,” Dennis said sharply. “What’s the big deal here?”

Mac fidgeted in place, still not looking at him. He glanced at something over Dennis’s shoulder and then looked back down, eyes somewhere near Dennis’s waist but he was pretty sure Mac was zoning out more than focusing on him, really. Which was totally unacceptable for a host of reasons.

“It’s the tapes, bro,” Mac said at last on a sigh. He ran his hand through his hair, an anxious gesture, and glanced at him again. “I don’t wanna be on your video camera.”

“Oh.” Dennis thought this concern over for a second, then laughed and tipped back into him. This time when Dennis ran his hands over his chest and sides, Mac grabbed automatically for his biceps to steady them both, although he didn’t look any happier.

“Well, that’s okay, Mac,” he said, throwaway. His lips skated across Mac’s jaw. “’Cause you’re not _on_ any of the tapes.”

He ran his hand over the side of his face, intending to angle him back down into a kiss, but Mac’s brows drew together and Dennis leaned back to look at him, curious.

“What do you mean?” said Mac. “We’ve—”

He didn’t go on but he gestured vaguely toward Dennis’s bed, encompassing the general idea of them messing around in here before when there had been plenty of light and time for the camera to catch their faces. Dennis took his hands off of Mac and leaned back against the door jamb opposite him with a sigh. He crossed his arms and looked him up and down.

“I break all the tapes you’re in,” Dennis said.

An absurd flicker of something that looked like hurt came over Mac’s face.

“What?”

Dennis sighed. “Yeah, my camera’s never off. But any time you’re in a tape, I smash it up after you’re gone.”

Mac just stared at him, still looking a little wounded. _“Why?”_

Dennis spread his hands, impatience rising up in him now. Why the fuck were they having this pointless conversation when they could already be halfway to an orgasm by now, that’s what he’d like to know.

“Who gives a shit, Mac?” he said testily. “You didn’t wanna star in any of my tapes, and you don’t. Why are you getting so pissy about it?”

“I don’t know, maybe because it sucks that you don’t want to — to—”

“To _what_?” Dennis spat.

Mac’s gesturing around wildly in the air, but he didn’t finish his sentence, although he choked a couple of times like he wanted to and couldn’t.

“I don’t know!” Mac shouted instead.

“Jesus Christ,” Dennis muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose in his fingers and shaking his head. When he looked back up, Mac was watching him fretfully. “It’s not a big deal, okay, dude? This isn’t exactly something I want broadcast to the whole world, you know, but it’s not because I’m like…regretting that we’re doing it, or something. I’d just rather keep it between us.”

“That’s what I want too!” Mac said, but still too loudly, still too emotional. They looked at each other for a long moment before glancing away. Mac sighed. “I’m gonna go take a shower. You should clean up your face a little better. Charlie did a shitty job.”

Dennis crossed his arms again, scowling in the other direction. Mac grimaced and slinked away.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered, sitting down on the edge of his bed. His hands scratched, frustrated, around the edges of his face. “God _damn_ it.”

Not that it mattered, he supposed, in the long run, but he wondered if it would have made a difference if he had said he kept the tapes but just hid them a little better than the others. He wondered if it mattered, at all, that he always methodically starred all of his tapes as soon as he ejected them, regardless of if he then stepped on them until they broke. He wondered if it would have mattered if Mac saw how often it was four stars or higher.

Dennis fell back on his bed, spread-eagled, and sighed up at the ceiling.

“Goddamn it, Mac,” he muttered, picking at a thread coming up out of his comforter. Trust him to be insufferable enough to turn a mid-afternoon roll in the hay into an argument that probably meant Dennis was going to have to go without for a few weeks at minimum. An argument, he remembered with a rush of frustration, where they _both agreed_ with each other.

With another sigh, Dennis got up to double check his camera and see if he and Mac had been visible, sliding their hands and mouths over each other in the doorway. They were. He almost didn’t, out of spite, but in the end he took the tape out and put the heel of his foot through it, so it splintered out into the carpet. Just like always.

 

It took two and a half weeks, then Mac got drunk and found Dennis lying in his bed in just a pair of track pants. He levered himself really clumsily onto the mattress and basically fell right on top of him in it; Mac didn’t even seem to care, just kind of slung his arm around him and laid there with his face in his neck like he was really going to fall asleep like that, just splayed out on top of him so Dennis was bearing all of his weight. Dennis waited five seconds to see if he was going to move before he shoved him off onto the other side of the bed.

“You’re fucking wasted, Mac,” he said, lips quirking in a kind-of smile. “What are you doing in here?”

“Your bed’s bigger, remember?”

He kind of mumbled it into his pillow.

“Okay, true, but we weren’t sharing.”

Mac rolled over closer to him, curling an arm back over his waist. He pried Denis’s legs apart with one of his ankles and firmly situated one of his own in between them.

“’Night,” he mumbled into his shoulder.

Dennis laughed. “Let me get you some water, dude.”

Mac grumbled when he had to sit up but he obediently chugged back the whole glass when Dennis handed it to him, eyes blinking wide and innocent up at him the entire time. Dennis skidded his thumb across Mac’s cheek for half a second before grabbing the glass back from him to go refill and put down on the end table along with some aspirin. Mac got bitchy with a headache, and he smelled like tequila, which always gave him one. He’d be grateful in the morning.

“I drank the water like you said.”

Dennis crossed his arms. Mac was just looking up at him with his mouth pressed together, something unreadable in his face.

“You sure did, buddy,” he said lightly.

“Are you trying to get me more sober so we can hump?”

Dennis just stared at him for a long moment, smiling slightly in disbelief. Mac was fucking unbelievable.

“Go to sleep,” Dennis said at last.

But he didn’t lay back down until Dennis shut off the lights and got back in his bed with him. Mac immediately rolled over and just kind of pressed his back insistently against Dennis, until Dennis also rolled onto his side and slung an arm over him.

They didn’t mess around in the morning like they might have on a different day where they woke up pressed together and half-naked, on account of Mac’s predictable tequila headache and Dennis having to hear him throw up in the bathroom for ten minutes. But the gang went out dancing that night, or at least to a bar with music and _they_ were dancing, and when they got home, Dennis grabbed his ass and Mac pulled him into his room so they could grind it out for fifteen or so minutes before they sixty-nined.

And things were back to normal, just like that.

 

Mac had been falling asleep in his bed, or the other way around, more often than not recently. It was just easier, realistically, because they could go to sleep where they fell after they hooked up and they could even go for another round in the morning if they were in the mood. Easy.

“Go to sleep, Mac,” he huffed irritably from his side of the bed, because nothing was ever easy when it came to Mac. “Stop moving around so much, it’s irritating as shit.”

“You took my good pillow,” Mac said petulantly.

Dennis rolled over to glare at him.

“Mac, this is a _set_ that I bought for you. They’re all the goddamn same.”

“No, that’s the one I always sleep on,” he insisted. “It knows the shape of my head.”

“That’s completely ridiculous!”

Mac pouted at him until, with a tremendous amount of cursing and grumbling, Dennis grabbed the pillow under Mac’s head and swapped it out for his. Mac grinned at him, blindingly, and Dennis rolled his eyes while Mac proceeded to make a show out of getting comfortable again. Dennis turned onto his back and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Mac,” he said shortly, his hands curling and clutching the sheets in his fists.

“What?” he asked innocently.

“I can and will smother you to death if it means I finally get a good night’s sleep.”

“Sheesh, relax. I’m all good now.”

“ _Are_ you?”

“Yep, one hundred percent.”

“Great.”

Ten seconds of peace. Then, “Dennis?”

“For God’s sake, _what_?”

“Can I have some of the blankets back or do you really need, like, all eighty percent of them?”

Dennis focused on breathing evenly in and out of his nose so he didn’t pummel Mac to death in his bed right now.

“Okay, don’t have a coronary over it,” said Mac. “Christ, I was kidding.”

“I hate you,” Dennis said, rolling back over onto his side and curling up to sleep. Mac tugged a little blanket back toward himself and finally shut up.

It wasn’t Dennis’s fault, he thought furiously in the morning, that he couldn’t control what he did when he was sleeping. He started out steadfastly on his side of the bed, but the fact that he ended up rolling into Mac in the night was something that he couldn’t help. That it happened nearly every time they slept in each other’s bed amounted to the same thing.

He woke up to Mac snoring with his mouth open above him and his cheek pressed to Mac’s chest. Mac had an arm looped loosely around Dennis’s back, and he stirred when Dennis worked his way free and got up. Mac just turned onto his side, arm splayed out across the mattress. His fingers clenched on the sheets for a second before his eyes blinked blearily open. Dennis smirked down at him while Mac struggled to get him into focus.

“Where are you going?” he asked, slurring with sleep. “Not time to get up yet, bro.”

Dennis laughed.

“ _You_ can stay,” he said, nudging his foot with one of his knees, “but then don’t blame me if you sleep through pancakes.”

Mac sat up immediately, although he put a hand to his head like it hurt and his gaze didn’t seem any less blurry. Dennis laughed again and left the room.

Mac stumbled out finally after Dennis had already eaten two and finished his coffee. He pushed a stack toward him and Mac mumbled appreciatively as he dug in.

“What do you wanna do today?” he asked around a mouthful.

“Gotta take my car in to the mechanic, but after that…” He shrugged and started collecting his empty dishes to dump in the sink.

“What’s wrong with the car?”

“Not sure. It’s making some weird rumbling noise and the check engine light is on, though.”

“Did you have Charlie look at it first?”

Dennis glared. “Of course I did. What am I, an idiot? He doesn’t know what’s wrong with it.”

“Okay, whatever,” said Mac, holding up a placating hand. Then he fixed Dennis with a serious look and said, “Who’s picking you up? Your mechanic is across town.”

“Dee,” he said with a little shrug.

“Okay…well, just call me if she doesn’t get there on time. That’s a weird part of the city and I don’t want you waiting around there—”

“Mac, you don’t have to coddle me, God. I know how to call a cab when Dee proves once again that she’s useless.”

“I’m just looking out for you, bro,” said Mac, brandishing his fork at him. Dennis rolled his eyes.

By the time Dennis got home that afternoon, their coffee table was already littered with beers and Mac was red-eyed and grinning hazily up at him from the couch. Dennis set his stuff down and kicked off his shoes, then raised an eyebrow at him, amused.

“How’s the car?” Mac asked.

“Easy job,” said Dennis, waving his hand in the air. “I can go pick it up tomorrow.”

“Cool.”

Mac started examining his cuticles. Dennis just kept looking at him.

“Don’t you have a shift in an hour?” he asked mildly.

“Calling out sick,” said Mac. “Oh, that reminds me.”

He dug his phone out from the couch cushions and quickly typed something out. Dennis snatched the phone from him and sat down hard on the couch too.

“What are you doing?” Mac asked, leaning into his shoulder.

“You’re gonna get us both in trouble if you try and text, bro,” he said. “You look wasted.”

“I’m fine,” Mac said, waving at the many beers around him dismissively. “Charlie was here before.”

“Oh, great,” said Dennis, rolling his eyes.

He sent a properly-worded text to Frank that Mac had a fever and he needed Dennis around to make sure he didn’t start hallucinating and tip headfirst off the fire escape.

“You made me sound like an invalid,” Mac protested, poking Dennis in the side when Dennis reached to put the phone down on the table. “I wouldn’t need you to take care of me if I was sick. Why didn’t you just say we _both_ had fevers?”

“Because I don’t get sick,” Dennis said testily. “That would stretch the realm of believability, ‘cause if I was getting sick, I’d just tell my body to shut that shit down immediately.”

Mac stared at him.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he said at last.

“Don’t do this,” Dennis said irritably. “Can we just enjoy the night off that I so successfully got for us?”

When Mac went to grab more beers and some leftover Chinese from the fridge for them to eat, though, Dennis quickly deleted the texts Mac got from Frank, calling them out on lying and cursing them out in good measure. He shoved the phone deep into the couch cushions and just smiled at him when Mac came back out with their dinners.

They ate around the table, kicking at each other’s ankles or stepping on each other’s feet, and arguing lightly about a scheme they were entrenched in; Frank had convinced them recently to go flip houses with him, but after the family had insisted they go get the deed and come back with it, the plan was on hold until Frank got around to going down to the courthouse and getting a copy to show.

Dennis laid on his lap while they watched TV after dinner. Mac brushed his hand through Dennis’s hair with one hand and gestured at the screen so wildly with his other that Dennis kept getting jostled around where he lay, bumped this way and that as Mac jolted around.

Mac wanted to watch _300_ again, despite having seen it a million times already. Dennis was game; it was a great movie, after all. They both wanted to finish the whole thing but they started making out after the credits rolled, Dennis sitting up out of Mac’s lap and winding his arms around his neck to pull him down against him as he fell back against the armrest.

“This what you had in mind when you called us out sick?” Mac said, smirking.

Dennis pressed his hands up under his shirt, fingers curling, nails digging into his back. Mac sat back to strip his shirt off over his head.

“Not really,” said Dennis, planting a knee in between Mac’s thighs and grinding it firmly upward; Mac swayed toward him on a gasp, eyes going dark and hungry. “Can’t say I’m complaining.”

He pulled Mac down into his lap so he was straddling him and Mac muffled his moan into Dennis’s neck. Dennis petted his hands over and over through Mac’s hair while Mac reached down to fumble open his jeans. He was inching his fingers inside when Dennis pulled him in close.

“Hold up a second,” he said, but it was hard to make it sound like he meant it when he kept pulling Mac in to kiss between words. Mac didn’t stop wriggling his hand into his jeans and Dennis laughed, grabbing his wrist to still him. “Mac, hold on.”

Mac pulled back, studying his face. “What is it? What’s up?”

Dennis sat up, which pushed Mac off his lap a little. He licked his lips, running his hand back through his hair. It was a little hard to look Mac in the eye when he said, “I’ve, uh, been thinking.”

A guarded look came over Mac’s face. “Okay…?”

Dennis laughed and reached to smooth his hands across Mac’s sides. Mac scooted a little closer to him, shuffling over him, when Dennis scratched lightly at his ribs. He ducked his head down, watching his fingers tapping around Mac’s sides. Every time he tried to go on, looking Mac in the face again, he ended up closing his mouth and shaking his head, and went back to watching his hands.

“ _What_ , dude?” Mac said more aggressively.

Dennis shook his head quickly and tilted up to kiss him again instead. Mac wound his arms around his back, pulling him close, and Dennis leveraged his way into his lap; it wasn’t easy, tangling and untangling their legs until he finally spread his knees across Mac’s thighs and sat back.

Mac kept kissing him, fingers slipping across the buttons on Dennis’s shirt while his other hand spread out on his hip, holding him steady. Dennis gripped hard on his hair, shifting in his lap, and then all at once he pulled Mac’s hand away from his waist and pushed it down over his ass instead.

Mac gasped against his jaw and squeezed, instinctively; Dennis shifted back into his hold, encouraging him on. It took a couple of rounds of this before Mac leaned back and looked at him, mouth slightly open.

“Mac,” he said, gasping, shifting over him. “Look, I’m, uh…” He swallowed hard.

“What?” Mac said, scratching at his bare chest under the buttons he’d managed to pop, and Dennis exhaled sharply. It was times like this he wished Mac knew how to get a fucking clue. And every other second of their lives, honestly.

“I was thinking, we could maybe…I mean, I’m ready and — if you want to, I—”

“Dude, spit it out.”

“Take a goddamn hint, Mac,” he said irritably, pulling away a little to glare. “I’m tired of handjobs.”

Mac turned red, but he plowed forward anyway. It was admirable, really.

“I went down on you three days ago.”

Dennis rolled his eyes.

“That’s _not_ ,” he said, punctuating it by rocking his hips, backing up into his hand again, “what I _mean_.”

Based on the expression on his face, Mac’s brain appeared to have short-circuited. Dennis watched him work to digest this new suggestion with undisguised amusement, and he finished undoing his own shirt while Mac was stilled beneath him.

“Just to be clear,” Mac said eventually, “like, totally, one hundred percent. You’re talking about banging, right? Like, banging banging? As in, in-the-ass banging?”

Dennis paused to pull back and stare at him, openly letting his weariness and disbelief show. Jesus _Christ_. Mac still looked pretty frozen.

“Yes, Mac,” he said tiredly. “I’m talking about in-the-ass banging.”

Mac just stared at him for another handful of seconds, visibly trying to get his brain working again. Dennis shook his head. He really did have to do everything himself.

“What were you, uh. What were you thinking?” Mac asked when he finally jolted himself back to life. He slipped his hands across Dennis’s bare sides while Dennis shrugged the shirt off his shoulders.

Dennis kept him steady with a hand buried in his hair and skimmed his lips along his jaw. He knew what Mac was really asking.

“I was thinking we go to my room and you, uh, show me the one thing I don’t already know about you in bed,” Dennis said, gliding a finger down his collarbone. “You don’t have any tapes to watch so I don’t _really_ get the full experience through the walls. It’s only fair.”

Mac was nodding hastily before Dennis finished talking.

They fumbled their way through his bedroom door, pulling on each other and dragging the rest of their clothes off. Only after they were already lying down tangled up together, Mac hovering over him, did they stop grabbing restlessly at everywhere they could reach and pause. They were both breathing pretty hard.

“Are you sure about this?” Mac asked, leaning back to look at him fully. His eyes flicked over Dennis’s entire face, again and again, studying him.

“Mac, baby.” He reached to clasp his neck in his hand, bringing him down close to him. Mac went a little cross-eyed to look at him. Dennis laughed softly. “ _Yes_ , I’m sure.”

He kissed him briefly and then shoved him back so he could get comfortable on his pillows. Mac was just watching him, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Dennis stuffed down some of the frustration rising up in him at the hesitation and worked to plaster a charming smile across his face.

“Been thinking about this, actually,” he said in a low voice. “For a while. Finally figured, fuck it. Why not today, right?”

He gave a little laugh. Mac still said nothing, just looking at him, and Dennis started to get a little annoyed; he let some of it show on his face for the first time, and hooked his ankle around the back of one of Mac’s thighs, pulling sharply until Mac pitched forward and had to catch himself with a hand on either side of Dennis’s body on the pillows. Dennis grabbed for his arms to steady him.

“You sure?” Mac breathed. “You wanna do that with me?”

Dennis wrapped his leg more firmly around the backs of Mac’s thighs.

“Yeah, man,” he said, relaxing into an easy smile. “Got ready before I left this afternoon, just in case.”

He didn’t mention the several other mornings this past month he’d done the exact same thing, only to wind up not following through when the opportunity struck. He told himself that the timing just wasn’t right; they hadn’t hooked up that night, or Mac initiated some other thing when they got in bed. But really he didn’t know what the difference was, why the other nights he decided not to but today he was ready. He just wanted to, now.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Mac asked. Quickly, he added, “’Cause I do, you know — not because I’ve done this before with other guys, but just — Carmen, you know—”

“Mac, seriously. Shut up.”

He said it lightly, but he still meant it. Mac did as he was told and looked back at him. The expression on his face was a close relative of terrified, and he wasn’t even the one on his back.

Dennis could count on one hand the number of times he’d done this before. Mostly in college, once with a girl who had a strap-on. He breathed out shakily, hands squeezing on Mac’s biceps a little, and Mac looked like he was going to ask if he knew what he was doing again and Dennis nodded jerkily, forestalling the question. Mac was looking at him like he was the strangest, most marvelous thing he had ever seen.

Mac knew he had slept with other men before him but he never asked about it or mentioned it, ever. Dennis knew that the thought of it probably twisted him up, the idea that Dennis might be _gay_ somehow a nauseating concept regardless of the fact that Mac was here, now, putting his hands on his hips and kissing his neck and grabbing for the stuff in Dennis’s end table so he could fuck him for real. More men equaled more gay in Mac’s head, whereas he probably considered Dennis either a fluke or an exception to the rule in terms of himself. It was a fucking shame that Mac being such an asshole about it was one of the small blessings in Dennis’s life, but there they were. At least they didn’t have to talk about it.

Dennis shifted around, getting comfortable while Mac grabbed the little bottle out of the bedside drawer. He got it uncapped and fully turned the bottle over, dumping it across Dennis’s thighs.

“Dude!” he yelled, pushing himself up and away from the stream of lube. “What are you doing?”

Mac turned the bottle upright again and looked at him, head cocked.

“We need…” He gestured vaguely at the mess he’d made. Dennis shook his head.

“Goddamn it, but why didn’t you just squeeze a little out on your fingers or something?” He swiped uselessly at the puddles on his legs. “Jesus, man.”

“I didn’t want to get it all over my hands,” he said with a shrug. “So I could still, like, touch you in other places and stuff.”

“So you decided I should take a bath in it?” Dennis said, voice still a little too loud and shrill.

“Relax, I got this.”

Mac leaned in to kiss him, gently; Dennis resisted for a moment, scowling determinedly, but after a few soft passes of Mac’s hand through his hair, Dennis reluctantly relaxed back on the bed and kissed him back. Mac’s fingers were light, tracing through the mess on the inside of his thighs and drawing the wet up and up.

“You ready?” he breathed against his mouth, hand hovering near his ass.

Dennis scratched lightly at the back of his neck, just over his spine.

“Yeah.”

He meant it, but he whined softly when Mac pressed a finger inside him anyway. He tilted his head down onto Mac’s shoulder while Mac started to finger him, slow at first but growing bolder as he slid in more and Dennis started to rock back on them, moaning breathily against Mac’s collar.

“Shit, Den,” he said, leaning back so he could look between them at his hand disappearing between his legs. “You’re, like, really into this.”

“Obviously,” he said, words and nails biting as he glared, at odds with how he kept rolling his hips up. “Why the hell else would I suggest it?”

“Yeah, but I just mean—” Mac paused to pull his fingers out and steady himself on the bed when he leaned to kiss him again, rough and hot. He pulled back, then dipped in for a few more short kisses before he finished, “It’s just…you know, sexy and shit.”

Dennis wanted to roll his eyes, but he got distracted by Mac starting to grind down on the bed and he redirected his energy into grabbing him hard by the back of the neck and forcing Mac up to look him in the eye. Pressing another, bruising kiss to his mouth, he sunk deeper down into the pillows and encouraged Mac further between his spread thighs until Mac shuffled up close to him. His hard cock brushed against his ass, and they both shivered.

For few minutes they just lay there, grinding desperately on each other. The only kissing going on was Mac biting hard across Dennis’s neck, and Dennis couldn’t stop moaning.

Finally he buried his hand in Mac’s hair and gripped hard, keeping him pressed against his throat as he breathed, “Okay, let’s do it. Let’s go.”

He reached to jerk Mac off a little, get him fully good to go, for a while until Mac nudged his wrist and looked down at him, eyes wide and full of something he couldn’t name. Dennis licked his lips and just looked back at him.

“What are you waiting for?” he said quietly.

Mac blinked at him hard. Then he ducked to smear a kiss across his mouth, brief before he pulled back.

“I’m really gonna—” said Mac, and Dennis laughed just as breathlessly, just as giddily, and murmured, “ _Yeah_.”

He relaxed back as Mac pushed himself back on his hands, and he looked Dennis hard in the eye, like he was looking for any signs of hesitation. He wouldn’t find any; Dennis just blinked up at him, more clear-headed than he’d been all night, and more sure than ever.

“Okay,” he said decisively.

Mac swallowed, head dipping in a fast nod a few, shaky times.

“Yeah. Okay,” he whispered back.

Getting spread open and slowly entered was a strange feeling, not really welcome but not unwelcome, either. It had been a while. Dennis still let out a strangled half-moan when Mac started to ease into him, though, not entirely from pleasure but definitely not a complaint. Mac was breathing hard, harder than him for what Dennis felt was no good reason. He was the one getting a dick shoved up his ass, for Christ’s sake.

But he just scratched his nails down Mac’s cheeks, reassuring and not too hard, until they were locked together and he shifted around, getting more comfortable beneath him. Mac groaned softly when he moved, hips jerking a little, and Dennis made a small noise into the kiss he pulled him into.

“Okay,” he breathed, “Mac—”

Mac started out slowly at first, but Dennis’s encouragement (largely in the form of nails digging hard into his back) made him start to thrust hard enough to shake the bed frame right into the wall, and it still wasn’t the loudest noise in that whole room. If he hadn’t already been fooling around with him for months, maybe it would have been a little surprising how good Mac was in bed. A lot of it was definitely because he seemed much more focused on making Dennis feel good than he ever tried to do with women, but Dennis could understand why he’d so often heard those loud moans and shouts through the wall for the past ten or so odd years anyway. Mac knew how to work with what he had, and he wasn’t lacking, either.

Mac fucked him hard but not too fast, and he was moaning more than Dennis was, little noises pressed into the hollow of Dennis’s throat while Dennis did a hell of a job scratching Mac’s back up without any remorse at all. They rolled over after a while, and maybe it was Dennis’s threats of actually killing him if this lasted under ten minutes but Mac didn’t seem too close to the edge when Dennis straddled him and kept going. He was sweating and clutching desperately at him, sure, but he seemed good to keep at it.

“Just think,” Dennis whispered, laughing as much as he could against Mac’s cheek while busy getting fucked pretty hard at the same time, even while he was doing a lot of the work now, hips rolling back. “Now you’ll get a chance to _really_ see all the positions I can do.”

Mac’s smile flashed just briefly across his face before he dug his fingers into Dennis’s waist and thrust up particularly sharply, making his thoughts scatter for a minute.

The conversation stalled until Mac had him on his back again, thighs overlapping on Mac’s and pulled up tight to where he was kneeling upright on the bed, and Mac scratched his nails down Dennis’s chest, catching sharp and unrelenting on his nipples and dragging a confused, satisfied sound out of him.

“Thought I’d already seen all of your positions,” Mac grunted out.

“What?”

“On the tapes,” Mac explained. “Thought I’d seen it all.”

Dennis closed his eyes and grinned up at nothing.

“You haven’t seen what I can do from here,” he breathed. He started listing off positions. “Reverse cowgirl, reverse piledriver, seated scissors, wheelbarrow—”

“Can you do the one where you shut up and stop bragging while I’m fucking you?” Mac wondered innocently.

Dennis swatted out lightly at him, a motion that turned into him grasping desperately for Mac’s arm when Mac heaved forward and started driving right at the angle that he’d tested a few times already when the impulse struck, the one that made Dennis’s brain shut down briefly as the waves of pleasure washed over him.

“Yeah,” he panted when he came down. “If you promise to actually make me cum instead of dicking me around all day.”

“You don’t like me dicking you around?” Mac asked — teased, that same faux-innocence back on his tongue — as he pulled on Dennis’s hips so they were pressed fully together and he ground hard and long inside of him.

“I regret ever sleeping with you,” Dennis said, an assertion entirely belied by him reaching to pull Mac down into him so he could lick his way smoothly back into his mouth. Mac curled his tongue alongside Dennis’s immediately, already an expert at _that_.

Dennis came with every inch of Mac’s body pressing down on his own, one leg wrapped around his waist and the other loosely slung over the backs of his thighs, Mac’s tongue in his mouth and his hand jerking him off fast and slick. He grabbed the sides of Mac’s face and kissed him, smooth and deep, and rolled his hips to meet his thrusts until Mac came too, shuddering against him with his arms wrapped around him to hold him tight.

They lay panting side by side in the dark, afterwards. Dennis had this crazy, stupid grin on his face that he didn’t try very hard to wipe off, but only (or so he told himself) because Mac wasn’t looking at him anyway.

“Holy shit,” Mac breathed. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, then splayed his arm out gracelessly. It flopped against Dennis’s chest. He worked slowly on building up the energy to throw it off. “Can we _please_ fuck like that every day of the week?”

And a crazy, stupid laugh ripped its way out of Dennis’s chest. He shoved Mac’s arm off him at last. With a gargantuan effort, he hefted himself up onto his elbow and loomed over Mac, smirking at him through the dark.

“Give me twenty minutes and we can start on that _tonight_ ,” he said, but he didn’t mean it and Mac seemed to know it from the way he wrapped his arm around Dennis’s waist and muffled a wild, happy laugh into his shoulder. Dennis grinned back, petting his hands through Mac’s hair over and over. They lay there in the dark for a while, rocking back and forth and smiling and holding each other.

Stupid fucking bullshit.

For the first time, he didn’t even give a shit that it mattered. And goddamn, did it fucking matter.

 

Once the flipping houses scheme turned into a real estate partners scheme, they didn’t have a ton of time to themselves. Yeah, okay, Dennis blew Mac down on their living room couch before they left to do their Honey and Vinegar “partners in life” schtick to drive up the price of Dee’s womb, but he didn’t get to take his _time_.

After it went to hell, though, he had nothing but.

They were thrumming with some twin excitement, some shared adrenaline. Usually they were dejected or peeved off when a scheme didn’t pan out, but they’d gotten to swim in a pool and Dennis had had fun playing around at being real estate partners with him anyway. Slipping into someone else’s skin gave him a certain kind of high that he just couldn’t find anywhere else, and for once Mac seemed to be exactly on the same page.

All of which meant, in short, that Dennis was in his still-drying shorts, standing in front of Mac sitting on the couch, slowly unbuttoning his pink shirt. The vest, he’d already let Mac strip off him before he pushed him down to watch as he swiveled his hips in time to the music he had going in the background.

He moved forward a little to stand over one of Mac’s thighs, and he dipped down almost low enough to brush his lap.

“Damn, Hugh,” Mac murmured, reaching out to touch his waist. “What’s the occasion?”

Dennis laughed and leaned almost near enough to kiss before pulling away, head tipping back as he stripped the shirt completely off his shoulders.

“Gotta keep the marriage alive, Vinegar.”

“We’re not married,” Mac commented lightly, eyes still firmly tracing Dennis’s hips. “It’s not legal.”

“We’re _basically_ married, then, whatever,” Dennis amended, rolling his eyes. “You sleep in my bed, you eat all the groceries I buy, you _fuck_ me like we’re married.”

Dennis smirked down at him, intending it to be hot, but Mac’s forehead creased with something like worry instead of taking the bait.

“Does that mean it’s bad?” asked Mac, looking up into his face. He was chewing on his lip.

“What?”

Mac tugged on his hips until he swung his legs over him and sat back in his lap.

“I don’t know, doesn’t the sex get bad once you’re married?” he asked. His fingers dug into Dennis’s waist as he held him down for a second to grind up on him, achingly hot, pulling a hiss out from between his teeth. “It’s like, all boring and shit and then you stop having it completely.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dennis said, rolling his eyes and his hips in equal measure. He leaned in to brush his lips against his jaw. “Vic, _baby_. I just meant ‘cause you know me so well. You can play my body _just_ right.”

He feathered a kiss to the edge of his mouth and then leaned back, grinning. He had that cardigan tied back around his shoulders and Dennis grabbed at the sleeves, tugging at it until Mac leaned in and bit down on his neck. He grabbed hard at Dennis’s ass, dragging him closer.

“Oh. Good,” Mac breathed against his throat. “I like the sex too.”

Dennis rolled his eyes again while Mac’s face was safely hidden. He ruffled up his hair between his fingers, stroking through it while Mac kissed, slow and dreamy, across his neck. He squeezed his ass every now and then, and Dennis shuddered.

“You know,” Dennis said thoughtfully, tipping his head back so Mac could suck on his pulse. “Maybe it’s like, a domestic partnership? That would make sense, right? Since we’re ‘partners in life’?”

“That’s not legal either, Honey,” he murmured. “No civil unions either.”

That stumped him.

“Huh. Well, that seems bullshit,” he said.

It was supposed to be offhand, it was supposed to be _light_. It’s not like it made a fucking difference to him either way.

Mac leaned back and looked him in the eye. Dennis suddenly saw the danger signs, way too late in the game. He could sense the argument about gay marriage and God on the tip of Mac’s tongue, which in turn twisted right into his _I’m so fucking straight!_ speech. He’d heard it all before and Dennis was still here sitting on his lap, rubbing on his dick while he got hard from having a guy all over him.

Dennis cut the whole thing off by kissing him, safely putting his tongue to other uses. Mac was hesitant at first, but after a couple of seconds he seemed to release the tension he was holding onto and he tilted his head to kiss back. Keeping their mouths melded together, Dennis untied the cardigan and tossed it over his shoulder. Mac ground slow and dirty up into him.

“So just what exactly do Hugh Honey and Vic Vinegar get up to in bed?” Mac breathed against his neck.

Dennis slipped his fingers under the collar of Mac’s shirt, stroking over his chest where he could reach, and Mac shivered and laughed beneath him.

“Well,” Dennis said, pulling his hand out so he could tap a couple fingers thoughtfully against Mac’s mouth. “Let’s see. I think after a long day of, uh, _winning bread_ for us, which I do—”

“And I’m the trophy husband,” Mac cut in quickly.

Dennis grinned briefly.

“Trophy _boyfriend_ ,” he said with a little laugh, winding his arms around his neck. “Remember, because we can’t get married. Not legally.”

“Right. It’s a figure of speech.” His hands were greedy, running all over him like he couldn’t get enough, and Dennis just basked in it.

Dennis tipped closer to him. “Not much of one.”

“ _So_. After you bring home the bacon, and I spend all day, you know, looking hot and kicking ass—”

Dennis laughed a little. Mac pouted up at him, lower lip jutting out adorably until Dennis leaned in to press a little kiss to it.

“Yeah, after that,” he said, fingers combing his hair again. He just looked at him softly for a moment before he shook himself out of it, remembering to get back to business. “So, I’m probably tired after spending all day on my feet making us cash.”

“How tired?” Mac murmured against his mouth.

Dennis grinned briefly. He focused on just kissing him for a long moment, pulling his head into a tilt with the hand in his hair so he could roll his tongue along Mac’s in his mouth.

“Not too tired to come home and please my man,” he said, still smiling when he leaned down to press his lips to his again, short and sweet.

Mac was grinning, too.

“Yeah? Really?”

“Oh, of course not.”

He started shifting around on top of him again, hips rolling slowly. Mac clutched hard at him, moaning softly, moving with him. Dennis tipped his head back, forgetting the game for a second. Forgetting his next move. God, Mac felt good against him.

“Okay,” Dennis said, blinking hard and trying to concentrate. He was breathing kind of hard. Mac pumping his hips was very distracting. “Then I think my _good_ boyfriend Vic would take me to bed and help me, you know. _Relax_.”

Mac scratched restlessly at his sides. Dennis slipped his hands up Mac’s shirt, hot and searching against his skin, and Mac circled his lengthening cock desperately against him. After a few, long minutes of frantic touching, Dennis stripped Mac’s shirt up over his head and kissed him hard, rocking forward close to him. Mac scrambled to pull it free when it got caught on his wrists like he couldn’t get his hands back on Dennis fast enough.

“You just spend all day at home, making sure it’s all nice and in order when I get back,” Dennis breathed against his mouth, grinding down harder into him. “Sitting around, making sure you look your best. Plenty of time to relax. Plenty of time to build your strength up so you can treat your good boyfriend Hugh _right_ when he gets back.”

“Yeah,” Mac mumbled. “Yeah, I do—”

“Then do it, baby boy,” he whispered. His dragged his lips down Mac’s jaw, then back up his cheek, then slowly down toward his mouth again. Mac shivered hard against him like he’d been thrust suddenly out into the cold. “Don’t I deserve that?”

“Yeah, babe,” Mac breathed. He scrabbled at Dennis’s thighs, nails biting even through his shorts. “Yeah, you do. And I’m gonna give that to you, okay? I’m gonna — like you want, whatever you want—”

He leaned up to kiss Dennis again hard, arms winding around his back. Dennis breathed shallowly into his mouth. He felt itchy and electric all over as Mac heaved him out of his lap, groping desperately between his legs even while he shoved Dennis back toward his room.

They stopped kissing and grabbing at each other just long enough for Mac to throw himself backwards onto his bed. Dennis climbed onto the mattress too, shuffled over him, knees on either side of his thighs, and Mac grabbed desperately at his hips and pulled him down hard on top of him. Dennis moaned, pitching close to him. He cupped the back of Mac’s neck and pulled him up into a hard, wanting kiss.

Mac got him on his back and fingered him for nearly twenty minutes, sighing out Hugh’s name the whole time. He seemed riveted by watching him squirm around on the bed, hands tightening helplessly in the sheets, breath hitching whenever Mac saw fit to get a hand around his dick and stroke him a little just to take some of the edge off. Dennis sighed out happily, legs spreading further, whenever he did it and Mac was just watching him the whole time with his bitten-red mouth open and his hands both working.

Finally Dennis got fed up with watching him and not touching, and he reached to drag a couple fingers down Mac’s dick. At this angle he couldn’t really do much. Mac shivered so hard it was nearly a convulsion and abruptly stopped touching him altogether.

“That how you treat a good boyfriend like me?” Dennis asked. It was breathy, too high, his voice sounding unreal and not at all like his own. His fingers were working again, and he shrugged a little ways down the mattress so he could get a better angle to wrap his hand loosely around Mac’s dick. A lazy smile wound its way across his face as he looked at Mac. “You just get him all worked up and then leave him hanging?”

Mac’s throat worked like he wanted to say something, but no words came out and at last he just leaned to crash their lips back together, knocking Dennis’s hand out of the way.

Dennis was still on his back when Mac pressed himself further between his legs, but then Dennis rolled them over and pushed Mac back with one hand on his chest. Flirty smile, fluttering lashes. Always guaranteed to shut Mac up.

“Power bottom, remember?” Dennis said.

Mac bit his lip, tugging on Dennis’s hips to pull him closer.

“Need me to make power for you to take it,” muttered Mac.

“Then make some power, big boy.”

Dennis rode him hard for nearly forty-five minutes, moaning breathily around Vic’s name the entire time. Mac was sweating hard, but it was nowhere near as bad as Dennis, who was running so hot that his hair was tamped down flat on his head and he felt slick all over his body. Mac’s hands were running, up and down Dennis’s thighs and all over his stomach and chest, but he didn’t actually touch his dick again until the last five minutes or so before Dennis came.

When he was done rocking back on Mac’s lap, he eased off him and shuffled Mac out of the middle of the bed so he could turn around onto all fours and let Mac keep fucking him until he finished too. He still breathed the wrong name out into the stagnant, stuffy air of his bedroom but it was so good that Dennis didn’t even care. Mac ground hard into him, deep and rolling thrusts, until he finished cumming.

Mac leaned so hard into Dennis’s back when he was done that it was a thread away from being classified as collapsing right on top of him. Dennis nudged him off with shaky arms, still breathing hard, and flipped over to fall onto his back with a great rush of air out of his lungs. He pulled Mac into his arms, where he willingly laid his cheek on Dennis’s chest and closed his eyes while he got his breathing back under control. Dennis wrapped his ankle around the backs of his thighs and Mac shifted closer to him, pressing his knee between both of Dennis’s. Dennis grabbed for one of his hands and squeezed.

“So what’s the state of our marriage?” Mac asked, barely awake with his eyes closed and curling up close to him. Mac was always so useless after he came, all his limbs giving out as he reverted back to his dead weight. His scratched lightly at Dennis’s side, the only sign of life in him at all.

Dennis laughed and squeezed his hand again, still trapped in his own.

“Alive and well, Vic,” he said. He leaned to brush a kiss to the top of Mac’s head and breathed out slowly. “Goddamn. I think it’s better than ever.”

Mac was smiling right up until he fell asleep, still collapsed on top of him. Dennis didn’t let go of his hand until well into the night.

 

He was waking up, albeit sluggishly, somewhere relatively dark and cold. Whatever he was lying on was _hard_ , unrelentingly so, like metal or something. His back had a thick knot of an ache right between his shoulder blades that would definitely get worse as soon as he stood up.

Usually, no matter where he ended up, he could count on Mac being right there with him. Especially when he was first waking up, nowadays more than ever.

Groggy, he snuck a glance around, rubbing at his eye with one hand. He wasn’t really registering where he was, but dimly, he saw that Mac was indeed lying nearby beside him. A groan rumbled in his chest, but he was too sleepy to get it to fall from his mouth; he reached for Mac’s hand to pull his arm over his waist, to get as comfortable as he could like usual so he could fall back asleep, but his hand hit on nothing but air. Clumsily, he reached back for his body instead, searching out any part of him — anything to touch him, to indicate as best he could without having to really wake up, to talk to him or move, that he wanted him to come closer.

Mac usually got it without him having to try this hard. Sleeping with Mac wrapped around him was warm and safe and good. It was _normal_. A dim sense of annoyance flickered up in him toward Mac for breaking from routine.

His knuckles brushed Mac’s chest, oddly far away compared to how closely they usually ended up pressing together in the night. Always, it seemed, they rolled together under the sheets, an irritating but unavoidable fact in Dennis’s opinion. He blearily looked over at him again, slightly more intent this time. His brow creased in confusion; these weren’t their blankets. The hard, uncomfortable surface he was lying on suddenly became much more obvious against his aching back.

Oh, fuck. The trailer.

Dennis pulled his hand back swiftly as he took in the room around them — the dull walls of the U-Haul, the hard floor he was lying on. Frank and Dee, waking up above their heads. Goddamn it. The road trip; he was on the road trip to the Grand Canyon, _right_.

He pushed himself up a little onto his elbows and quickly joined in on wondering aloud where they were, how far they had gotten.

The hitchhiker had stole Dee’s car and left them stranded back at the bar. They got good and drunk that day and he didn’t get to back to sleep until well into the night. He and Mac both laid down in their own rooms, but he figured — whatever. It wasn’t reasonable to expect to get it _every_ night, that warm and comfortable weight against him that meant he could sleep a full eight hours. No big deal. Mac was annoying to fall asleep with anyway because he fidgeted so much.

He went without for four days, until Mac came ambling into his room at around midnight, hair mussed, eyes squinty, and mumbling something about the neighbors banging disturbingly loud on the other side of his wall. Dennis muttered some complaint or another while Mac got comfortable on his side of the bed and he tried not to think too hard about Mac having a _side_ in here at all, or vice versa.

And, goddamn it. Mac wrapped an arm around him, snuggling into his back, and Dennis slept like a goddamn baby all night.

 

They weren’t technically on a date. They were dressed nice and having dinner together, _yes_ , but just so they could stay near Charlie and make sure he wasn’t screwing up _his_ date too badly. Also, it was going fucking terrible.

“Holy shit,” Mac muttered, leaning across their table toward him, “Dude, he just said he was a _full on rapist_.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Dennis, dragging his hands down his face. “Mac, he’s totally going to go postal and kill all of us. The kid can’t keep a date to save his life, and he’s gonna find out the waitress is engaged, and he’s gonna kill us.”

“He’s getting up — he’s getting — Come on, he’s going to the bathroom,” said Mac, gesturing him up from the table and they scrambled to follow Charlie out of the main dining area.

After a brief argument about dress shirts and the correct way to get women in bed, they managed to wave Charlie back out through the bathroom door so he could try and salvage what he could from this woman. Dennis fell back against Mac’s arm by the sink, shaking his head.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, then remembered another point of contention and whirled back around to glare at Mac. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Do you really just ask women if they wanna bang you and hope they say yes?”

“It’s easier than trying to talk to them and get them to like you and shit,” Mac said, exasperated. “Women don’t exactly love hanging out with me, Dennis.”

“Maybe it’s because you treat them like shit! Oh, my god.” He shook his head. No fucking wonder Mac had so much free time to bang Dennis instead. He couldn’t get a woman to stay interested him if the safety of the world hinged on it. “Can we just — Can we go back out there and make sure we’re helping Charlie, please?”

Mac rolled his eyes and gestured for him to lead the way. Muttering, “Fifty-fifty shot — fucking ridiculous,” under his breath, Dennis led him out the door and back over to their table.

Charlie continued to wreck the date, and after the woman finally left, Dennis ended up yelling the truth about the waitress getting married anyway out of sheer exasperation. Charlie said, “I see,” and stared, unmoving, at his table for five full minutes before getting up and striding out of the restaurant, with no goodbye and just a little too much purpose for comfort.

“Jesus Christ,” said Dennis, turning to Mac for — what, exactly, he didn’t know. “Yep, we’re dead.”

Mac shook his head, hands on his hips. Dennis was mapping out the easiest way to get his hands on a bullet proof vest, just in case.

“Well, look,” said Mac eventually, taking a deep breath in. “There’s nothing we can do besides get ready, and even then it won’t matter until we go back to Paddy’s. We already ordered, dude, why not just…you know. Stay here and finish dinner.”

He gave a little shrug, avoiding Dennis’s eyes. Dennis watched him curiously for a few seconds, but Mac just stood there not moving. Dennis looked him over, a little smile on his face, until Mac looked up and met his eye. When he saw his expression, Mac relaxed into a smile too.

“I could finish that wine,” Dennis said, tapping his fingers against his mouth thoughtfully. “It cost me enough.”

Mac nodded swiftly. “Yeah, definitely.”

Dennis’s linguine was room temperature by now, not that appealing anymore. But the wine was good and Mac was so happy on the other side of the table, chattering on about new karate moves he’d learned recently and waving his hands so much that flecks of sauce were spattering off his fork and flying all around him. Dennis grinned back at him, snapping occasionally when the sauce got on his shirt but mostly just sitting back and letting him ramble. He was really only half-listening.

Not a date. But Dennis grabbed the check for the both of them and his chest tightened when Mac smiled at him and he was thinking that Mac looked really good even though he obviously had no idea how to dress up for a nice restaurant.

Dennis felt warm and half-drunk when they left. Mac kept leaning into him while they walked, almost like he was stumbling but they’d had the same amount of wine and he kept his arm pressed to Dennis’s for just a couple seconds too long every time. Dennis was seized with a sudden, startling urge to take his hand. He quickly shook himself out of it.

When they got home, Dennis went to raid their fridge for something nonalcoholic to drink and Mac collapsed on the couch.

“I had fun tonight,” he said dizzily, looking up at the ceiling.

Dennis grinned at him when he came back into the living room and threw himself down on the chair. He chugged from his glass of water, throat dry from the wine, and Mac grinned lazily at him and kicked out at his ankle.

“Yeah, I like it there,” Dennis murmured.

Mac just sat there smiling for another few seconds before he sighed, neck cracking as he rolled his head around and tilted his face back up toward the ceiling.

“You up for a movie or something?” Dennis asked after a while, and Mac jumped up to start digging through their DVD collection.

 

A month passed. Every night they had microwave dinners or delivery or something easy they could make with what little they had in the fridge.

Dennis was sitting at the kitchen table, elbows propped up and flipping through a magazine without really taking in any of the words. Mostly he was just scanning the pictures and reading the big quotes that stood out in block letters in the middle of the articles. He turned slightly when the door opened, glancing up as Mac came in, for just a second before he went back to the magazine.

“Hey man,” Dennis said idly.

“Hey.” Mac toed off his shoes.

“You hungry? I was gonna make something soon.”

“What were you thinking?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Not sure,” Dennis said. He wasn’t really craving anything, but he was starting to get hungry anyway. “You in the mood for anything?”

Mac didn’t answer right away. Dennis glanced up but he paused when he did, attention snagging on Mac’s expression. He was fidgeting a little in place, hands twisting together, and he was chewing on his bottom lip like he always did when he was anxious about asking something. He was just standing a few feet away beside the table, looking at him. Dennis sighed.

“Spit it out,” he said.

“I was wondering…well,” he said, taking a deep breath and looking at the carpet, “Dennis, I was wondering if maybe we could go back to Guigino’s? It doesn’t have to be tonight if you don’t feel like it. Just, you know. Sometime soon.”

He shrugged a little, jerky and unsure. Dennis put the magazine down and leaned back in his seat, studying him. Mac scratched at the back of his neck.

“Why?” he asked finally.

Mac turned around and wandered further into the living room. He batted out at the corner of the wall beside the kitchen as he passed, almost nonchalant but Dennis could tell he was still just being fidgety. Mac turned around with his arms spread and said on a breath,

“I don’t know, man. I guess I just…liked it there, that’s all.”

Dennis was smiling at a little at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Mac, looking around the whole room before sighing and settling his gaze back on Dennis. “I’ve just been thinking about it, is all. You know. Going back. I know we were just there and everything, but…”

Dennis was still just smiling at him, shifted toward him, leaning back in the chair and watching Mac squirm.

“How long, uh…How long have you been thinking about it?” he asked, because he just couldn’t help pushing, couldn’t help drawing it out as long as possible even though he’d known he was going to say yes as soon as he realized how much that answer would make Mac light up brilliantly.

Mac was scowling at him, though, now. He said, “Alright, you don’t have to—” and Dennis hastened to get up and cross over to him, running his hands soothingly over his chest.

“Calm down, baby, I’m just messing with you,” he said, and Mac immediately stopped being mad and looked up with such a trusting and open expression that it tugged painfully on Dennis’s heart. Oh, goddamn him. He made himself smile and reached to tousle Mac’s hair. “Of course we can go back to Guigino’s.”

“Tonight?” Mac asked, ducking away from him and smoothing his hair back down in the reflection in the window.

Dennis watched him bent over to fix his hair. He really wished that dumb, tiny smile would stop taking control of his mouth.

“Sure, if you want.”

Mac spun around to grin at him, big and happy and Dennis wanted to groan, wanted to spend all night grinding on him on the couch instead, wanted to smile just as brightly back.

Instead of doing any of that, he hastened to say, “Whatever means I don’t have to cook again tonight,” and Mac nodded dutifully along with him, hands clasped behind his back and his weight tipping up to the balls of his feet.

They got dressed and left quickly; the whole way there, Mac kept shooting him little glances and big, happy smiles, and Dennis just rolled his eyes and tried not to smile too hard back.

Dennis had to bribe the maître d’ pretty well to get them a table without reservations, but it was worth it; Mac was by the bar, tapping his knuckles unhappily against the wood and shooting him exasperated glances, but when Dennis flashed him a thumbs-up when they secured seats, Mac lit up like he’d bought the whole place out.

Their waiter was rude, exasperatedly saying, “Oh, good…You gentlemen are back already, huh?” despite them never having met before. Mac looked at Dennis so warmly and for so long that Dennis started to flush a little hot, and he quickly raised his wine glass up to drink and cover his face.

“We should start doing this a lot more,” Mac said, bright and cheerful and digging into his lobster with both hands despite a perfectly good fork lying right there.

Dennis flicked his gaze to him over the rim of his wine glass. His hair was a little messy, cheeks and eyes bright from the vodka cranberries he’d tossed back when they first got here while Dennis bartered for a table. He had bits of the complimentary bread in his teeth and he had managed to scrub some lobster juices across one of his cheeks.

Dennis swallowed, heart constricting again.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. He offered him a little smile too. He didn’t say it, but even he knew that he’d do whatever Mac goddamn wanted if he kept looking at him like that. He found his mouth running without him thinking too clearly about it, and suddenly he heard himself say, “We could even make this a regular thing. Dynamic duo gets a night out.”

Mac looked up at him, surprised. After a moment, he broke out into a shining smile. Dennis hastened to look down. He started fiddling with his silverware to keep himself busy.

Oh, god _damn_ him.

Dennis looked back at him. He tried to stifle his own expression by drinking more wine, but he couldn’t do jack shit about the things his heart was doing. Goddamn it.

 

The energy running between them like a live wire, keeping them tethered together at the hip and mind and usually by the mouth, sometimes sparked and flared up into the wrong impulses.

They were doing push-ups on the courtroom floor to see who had more core strength, and he was taunting Mac that he only worked out his glamour muscles (the underlying compliment, that it was working because strong or not he looked fucking _good_ , Dennis swallowed firmly until they got home and he could show him what he thought instead).

They were bottling up all that competitiveness and want (and arousal, it was never a full package with Dennis unless he was trying to get laid too) and throwing it like a Molotov cocktail over the new merchandise for the bar. Frank was three steps ahead of them with a hot woman selling his product but Dennis was on his knees, eyelids flickering while Mac blasted liquor down his throat from a shotgun it was impossible to watch him pump without thinking about his hands on Dennis’s body. Mac had a towel with a dick drawn on it slung around his waist, drawing Dennis’s eye there, and Dennis was pulling down his jeans so Mac could get a good look at the thong riding up on his hips. They got each other off in a haze of “you’re so _smart_ ” mixed with hormones, pure and simple and ratcheted up to eleven, four times before the scheme was through.

And they kept going back to Guigino’s, once every month. They’d dress up nice and Mac would spritz on too much cologne and they’d play pretend at being normal people for a while. The gang didn’t matter then, the stupid shit they dealt with every day didn’t matter, not when they were there. They were just two people who were even kind of _nice_ to each other, and most times afterward they went home and it wasn’t the desperate, needy messing around that they usually did together. It was something softer, something warmer, on those nights. The dinner wasn’t a date but sometimes Dennis caught himself wondering if he would even fucking care if it was.

And then, right when Dennis was finally starting to believe that he could feel this electric all the time, right when he was starting to think that him and Mac were locked into something hot and perfect and good that would last them at least a couple years before it fizzled, or faded, or changed — right then, there was Dee.

 

Dee was a fucking _bitch_ for ruining this thing he had, Dennis thought, this carefully curated and tended thing he had with Mac that he’d found suddenly in his lap. He didn’t know if it had just fallen there by accident or if one of them could take the credit for making it, but it didn’t even matter because Dee got in their heads. Dennis was the one to suggest that Mac move out, that they take a little time to get some space, but from what he could tell from his phone calls with Charlie, Mac was hurting just as bad from the distance.

They got back together, of course. When they were back in the apartment alone that night, Mac sitting with his feet propped up on the coffee table and Dennis watching him with a soft smile from the kitchen, he remembered back to that morning and thought that he wasn’t even sure why he’d been so worried in the first place. Of course they would get back together. It was a no-brainer, a given. For all they pissed each other off, Mac was a constant for him, someone to be counted on being there in some capacity one way or another.

He got to think this way, blindly believing that things were exactly the same as they had been before they went over to Dee’s looking for a bigger popcorn bowl, for three beautiful days.

 

It crept up on him slowly, the suspicion. At first he just noticed little things: Mac standing a little farther from him than usual; just by a few inches, but still. How he’d lean away a little if Dennis threw his arm out along the back of the couch near his shoulders. The uptick in calling Dennis “bro.” Louder, maybe, were all the things he wasn’t saying: He didn’t compliment what Dennis was wearing when he came out of his room in the morning, even if Dennis knew by his stare that he liked it; he kept the conversations about men’s physiques down to an absolute bare minimum; Dennis was _smart_ , Dennis was _smooth_ and _charismatic_ , but suddenly Mac wasn’t calling him the _looks_ or making asides that amounted to telling him that he had a super rideable face.

For a week, Dennis waited for Mac to make a move, or at least come sleep in his bed again. But he held out, and he held out.

Dennis was good at a lot of things, but he’d never been very good at waiting. And honestly, fuck Mac for trying to make him. He had to do something.

He planned on subtlety, but Mac had to throw a curveball into even the simplest of ideas. So Mac came home from the gym a week or so after the not-a-break-up, and he whipped off his shirt to wipe at his forehead, and he insisted he needed to do some push-ups really quick because he hadn’t had the chance at the gym.

And Dennis, lying on the couch drinking a beer, watched him doing this for about a minute before he blurted out, “Hey, man. Wanna fuck?”

One of Mac’s hands slipped out from under him and he fell hard, face-first, to the floor. Dennis watched him push himself up and sit up, staring at him, without comment.

“What?”

“Wanna fuck?” Dennis repeated offhandedly. “Mess around. Get busy. Whatever euphemism you feel like applying here.”

Mac got a little red in the cheeks and swiped his hands over his thighs. He wasn’t looking at Dennis anymore, and his eyebrows were pulled together and something tightened in Dennis’s stomach. He drank some more, trying to erode the feeling, but it stayed firmly planted in his gut like someone was stepping right on him.

“Uh, look,” Mac said, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea—”

“Why?” Dennis said flatly.

“Don’t you think…” Mac licked his lips. “Isn’t this getting a little, you know. Gay?”

He looked up at Dennis finally, and Dennis aimed a carefully blank face back at him. His heart was beating so calmly that it worried him a little, like he was a trauma victim in shock before the broken leg set in even though he could plainly see that it was twisted up at the wrong angle.

Was it _gay_? he wanted to know. The question repeated itself back in Dennis’s head at a pitch that resembled hysteria. Dennis pushed himself up so he was sitting instead. He looked at Mac down on the floor, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, and was seized with a sudden and powerful urge to spit at him.

“Getting too gay,” he repeated slowly.

Jesus Christ, why was this _always_ what people wanted to know from him? Dennis wasn’t the holder of these guys’ fucking heterosexuality, for God’s sake. How Charlie dealt with and rationalized Dennis asking him to put on short-shorts for the fight club wasn’t any more Dennis’s fault than Mac getting in a panic because someone had called them out on something they weren’t trying too hard to hide. They didn’t shout about it, or even talk about it between themselves really, but they went out to a romantic candlelit dinner, _in public_ , every single month and all Mac’s shirts were pilfered from Dennis’s drawer and they had a standing movie night every Tuesday, every week. Dennis just didn’t _think_ about it, and he didn’t see why Mac had to make it his problem that he couldn’t do the same goddamn thing.

“Yeah,” said Mac, and he looked so small and vulnerable kneeling on the floor, like a lost little puppy scared on the streets, and Dennis was seized with the urge to kick him like the mutt Charlie had once sent flying down an alley after it bit the waitress.

“You wanna know if it’s getting too gay?” Dennis said in a low, dangerous voice.

“Well, I just — look, man, I think we just kinda let it get out of hand,” said Mac, voice frustratingly even. Dennis’s throat was burning. “It never should have happened in the first place, bro. It was an accident — Dee’s right, we’re — we don’t act normal around each other, Dennis! We — you treat me like your fucking girlfriend, dude, and I’m not—”

“Dee doesn’t know shit!” Dennis yelled, and Mac flinched. _Good_. Anything to stop him from finishing that goddamn, tired old sentence. That grating fucking lie he always told. If Dennis had to hear it one more time he was going to put a hole through the wall, ideally by using Mac’s head as the battering ram. “Dee’s a goddamn idiot, and a bitch, and she doesn’t have any fucking friends so what would she know anyway? We’re _best_ friends—”

“And maybe that’s where it should stop!” Mac shouted back, and then he inhaled sharply and held his breath like he was waiting for an explosion.

Dennis froze. He was breathing just a little too hard through his nose, fist too tight around his beer can so it was denting under his fingers. The reality of the broken leg finally set in, and his heartbeat leapt up to a shivering, stuttery tempo. Mac just stared at him with something unguarded and not quite afraid in his face. Dennis wanted to slap him, he wanted to beat the shit out of him, he wanted Mac to kick his ass instead. Anything to pull the safety of shock back over his eyes.

He set the beer carefully down on the coffee table, nostrils flaring.

“I see,” he said, forcibly calm. He was looking at a spot a little in front of Mac on the floor. He felt sick. He felt like he was throwing up the words and he couldn’t stop them coming any more than if they really were just vomit. “So…so all this, the shit we’ve been doing. Sleeping in each other’s beds, you know. And going out to dinner and — and all the other shit…Touching me when we watch movies…And me, like, doing your half of the chores just so you won’t bitch, and doing all the checking in business with you every fucking hour of the day just ‘cause you asked me to…And you…you, jerking me off and — and blowing me and _fucking_ me, that was all just some slip-up? _Oops_ , I wasn’t looking where I was going and I _accidentally_ tied Dennis to his bedposts! _My_ mistake, it was an _accident_ that you sat on my face for an hour and fifteen fucking minutes last month. You didn’t _mean_ for it to happen! Just an accident!”

He knew he sounded slightly hysterical and it didn’t matter one goddamn bit. And Mac just kneeled there on the floor, curling in on himself and looking fucking petrified, which, _good_. They never talked about it but if Mac thought that somehow meant it didn’t _happen_ , like looking away before you fed a dog from the dinner table so you could pretend you didn’t notice it chewing, he had another goddamn thing coming.

Dennis’s hands were shaking and he felt like he was going to shiver right out of his skin. Being manic meant days of laughing harder than he’d ever laughed and feeling so light he might drift right off the ground, so it definitely wasn’t that, but this close, angry cousin came with the same soaring heartrate and spinning head.

He was breathing hard and Mac just looked away from him, eyes dropping to the ground. If he were someone else, Mac would have said sorry, but Dennis didn’t have any illusions about that happening, ever.

“I just think we gotta stop,” Mac said. “Now, while we can still…”

He trailed off. It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks, though: while we can still right these wrongs. Get right with God or whoever, forget this ever happened, and continue life right where we dropped it off on our doorstep seven months ago. Like a runaway train he was finally remembering to set back on the tracks, content to let it keep chugging along, acting like it hadn’t already killed a few hundred civilians and leveled a couple of fields.

Mac swallowed hard. Dennis just looked at him and said nothing.

“Yeah,” Mac whispered, eyes still tracking the floor. “Yeah, yeah.”

He pushed himself up to his feet, still avoiding Dennis’s eyes. Dennis coldly watched him start to leave, to head into his room, but he couldn’t even give Dennis the courtesy of being alone because he touched his door and turned around.

“I’m gonna, um, take a shower and then do you wanna get lunch or something? There’s a new hotdog stand on the corner that I’ve been wanting to try.”

Dennis closed his eyes. He breathed in and out slowly, half-hoping Mac would just be gone when he looked up again, but of course he wasn’t. He was just standing there across the living room, that half-worried, half-apologetic crease still on his forehead, waiting for an answer.

“Yeah,” Dennis said, quiet but not soft. “Yeah, Mac. Let’s get lunch.”

Mac dipped his head in a little nod and finally disappeared. Dennis stared at his knees for a long couple of minutes until he whipped his hand out for his beer, and he slugged the rest of it back in one breath.

He wanted to lay down and go to sleep and hope he’d remember the conversation differently in the morning, but he wasn’t tired. He wanted to hurl something across the room until it shattered something or dented the wall, but he didn’t have anything handy. He wanted to scream but he didn’t want to answer any questions about it.

One thing was still true: Absolutely, from the bottom of his heart…

“Goddamn him,” Dennis whispered.

 

The worst part was that he knew damn well that Mac didn’t want to stop living in Dennis’s back pocket (right next to where he used to keep his hand, _there’s_ a punchline to the great cosmic joke that was Dennis’s life), but he was more scared of God than he was into Dennis. That one hurt a like a sucker punch right to the solar plexus and not just because he’d always considered himself a better, and certainly better-looking, god of sorts than the one that Mac liked to worship.

He couldn’t believe he’d let this fucking happen again, honestly. Fucked up and slept with his friend and somehow convinced himself it would end any different than the first time. Well, he was at least right on that score: Him and Charlie had had an amicable separating of ways, but this one was sharp-edged and mean and had left cracks all along the insides of their friendship, like glass that had been hit right in the middle with a baseball bat.

Things teetered. Dennis flexed his system with women again, a system that had admittedly been gathering dust lately but which he brought out again with ease. It was like a bicycle; sometimes you had to pump some air into the tires if it had been stuck in the garage all year, but you still remembered how to ride it. He taught the gang how to D.E.N.N.I.S. women themselves and his eyes bored into Mac, looking for any shift in his expression, but he seemed genuinely interested in the lesson. If anything, _Dennis_ was the one who flinched when it turned out Mac was sleeping with his sloppy seconds anyway.

Mac was getting louder about Catholicism, too. Suddenly he wanted to go to church every Sunday again, diligent like he hadn’t been in a couple of years. It was fucking annoying and not just because he was always loud as shit getting ready in the morning and it woke Dennis up hours before he had to get out of bed.

This specific Sunday had Dennis in a particularly shitty mood. They didn’t have an exact date for their standing dinner reservations once a month, but more or less it always fell on the last weekend — whichever day they both had time, sometimes pushed up a little early if that weekend really was no good.

Except it was Sunday, the _last_ day of the last weekend of the month, and they hadn’t gone yet. They hadn’t even mentioned it.

So, Dennis was _disgruntled_ but _not_ upset, because it wasn’t a _date_ so it didn’t matter if it got broken.

Except.

“Hey, dude, did you steal my Drakkard Noir?”

Dennis looked up from going through his phone at the table. He was kind of picking at some leftover soup but he didn’t have any real appetite for it.

“What? No, Mac, I didn’t steal your fucking cologne. What is this, high school? I think I have the money to buy my own scent, thanks.”

“Okay,” Mac said, poking his head through the doorway from his room. “But I can’t find it, and I always leave it right on my dresser, so — Woah, bro! What are you doing?”

“What am _I_ doing? What are _you_ doing?”

Dennis looked him up at down, what little he could see of him that was leaning out of the doorway. Mac was dressed up, as much as he ever really dressed up anyway. Dark polo shirt that still didn’t cover up his tats and a dark pair of jeans. His hair was slicked back a _lot_.

“Do you have a date or something, bro?” asked Dennis, because Mac didn’t really give up wearing his ugly slogan tees for anything except ugly regular tees. Anyway, he flashed him a smile. “Nice. Where did you meet her?”

“What? No. No, dude.” Mac came out a little more into the room, glaring at Dennis’s bowl of soup like it had burned up his share of the apartment or something. “Dennis, what are you doing? You never carboload before dinner. How will you get your money’s worth?”

Dennis raised an eyebrow at him.

“Are we going to dinner?” he asked mildly. He tried to think backwards, but he couldn’t remember them making plans. Not that it mattered anyway; Mac was right, his appetite was shot by now. Not that it was ever great to be begin with anymore.

“Yeah, bro. Our monthly dinner!” Mac said, waving his hands around like he did when he was upset. “It’s the last of the month, I figured — seeing as we didn’t go yesterday or whatever — Did you not make reservations?”

His mouth pulled down now, into a frown. He looked a little like Dennis had just got done kicking him around his room for fun. Dennis just stared at him. Mac looked back like he didn’t see one little, goddamn thing wrong or weird or shitty about what he was asking.

Because, here’s the thing. You more or less tell a guy you just want to be friends and you definitely don’t want to do any gay shit with him, he kind of starts to assume that the non-dates you were having every single month are now off the table. Candlelit dinners fell just a _little_ bit to the side of too romantic to brush off as normal friend behavior, at least in Dennis’s opinion.

But Mac, goddamn him. He was still just looking at him, all wounded and shit like somehow Dennis was to blame.

“No,” Dennis said, working himself out of his haze. He flapped a hand in the air. Placating. “No, bro, of course I made reservations. Yeah, I — No, no, go finished getting dressed! Because I totally…Yes, we have a table. Go, go.”

His mind was starting to unrust and work again, and he needed Mac to leave so he could start rectifying this — this failure to make a reservation on the sole assumption that Mac not wanting to sleep with him equaled Mac not wanting to be with him. Stupid, stupid.

Whether he was thinking that about himself or Mac, he wasn’t really sure.

“Are you sure you’re still hungry, bro?” Mac asked, nodding at the soup, lower lip worried between his teeth. “You still want to go?”

“I…yeah,” Dennis said, running his hand through his hair. Mac wasn’t giving him a whole lot of room to consider whether that was really true or not, but he thought that it was. “Just, um. Give me an hour, okay?”

Mac mumbled something about him taking his sweet time and disappeared back into his room. Dennis blinked after him for a few seconds before he shook his head, muttering profanities, and dialed the restaurant’s number. He didn’t even have to Google it anymore.

He fought with the hostess for twenty minutes about seating before she grudgingly said they could eat at the bar; he knew Mac was definitely not going to be happy about that but it was better than telling him they couldn’t go at all, probably.

Predictably, he threw a big fit, although not at Dennis; he’d elected not to break the news himself, instead waiting until they got to the place and letting the hostess do it for him. He could tell she was trying her level best not to scowl or snap at them when she put menus down in front of them and left.

Dennis threw back two gin and tonics before their food even came and Mac was still talking about the hostess being a bitch until he got so busy with his fish that he couldn’t talk shit at the same time.

No candles, no wine. No promise of getting laid later. Definitely not a date.

Dennis flicked his eyes to Mac sitting beside him and twisted his fork around in his own fish. Mac had been right, and he wasn’t that hungry. He dragged the tines through the food anyway, watching its insides mash up unrecognizably. Beside him, Mac was looking soft and happy, enjoying his dinner and grinning at Dennis every now and then like this was just another night out. Maybe it was.

“Hey, Mac,” Dennis ventured. “Do you think we could get one of these waiters to trip and fall into a plate of, like, spaghetti or something?”

When Mac looked up and smiled at him, a little happy, a little surprised, Dennis couldn’t help it; he got pulled into giving him a huge smile back. Things could always get better.

 

Here’s what counted as a small blessing nowadays: Dennis had diligently destroyed any and all tapes involving him and Mac getting any closer than friends should. He never had to slip his fingers over their greatest hits when he reached into his drawer, he never even had to think about whether or not he wanted to indulge the twisted desire he sometimes got, the urge to play certain good nights back on a reel. Having it show in his head, without his consent, was bad enough. On the days where that desire to watch their tapes mixed with any alcohol, he probably would have done it too, and that would have been a bad road to go down. Better that they were all gone. Better that they had barely ever existed.

The version of himself that thrummed with manic excitement and happy energy every day seemed like a very distant person nowadays. He couldn’t see what he had been so hyped up about back then, always laughing and hanging off Mac’s shoulder. What, because him and Mac were banging whenever they felt like it? Dennis was still pulling girls at will, so that couldn’t be a goddamn factor. And him and Mac, they were best buddies again. Picture fucking perfect.

A little ways into 2010, Dennis met up with his old high school girlfriend and, in a chase after that distant puppy-love feeling, he married her.

 

Mac was so goddamn annoying. Served him _right_ that Dennis had kicked him out, and now he was all pissed off that they had to sleep in the bar tonight because Maureen had threatened them. And things had been going so well between them before they went back to the apartment. _God_.

They were bickering over the bathroom sinks. Paddy’s was all locked up and deserted, and they were trying to scrub off some of the glitter from the strip club earlier, that and the thick layer of grime that he felt like was coating his skin after spending the night drinking and getting grinded on by strippers.

“You just _had_ to marry the craziest bitch out there,” Mac snapped. “You don’t even deserve to sleep in the bar with me. I’m still pissed at you for kicking me out. I should make you take the alley or something, dude.”

“Shut up,” Dennis bit back. “At least _I_ was trying to actually _do_ something with my life, like a normal person.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

He slammed a hand angrily down on the counter. “It means that you’re in your early thirties, Mac, and you’ve never had a goddamn girlfriend for longer than a month,” he said. “Besides Carmen, I can’t remember the last time you had a girlfriend, _period_.”

“I don’t meet a lot of women,” Mac said furiously, “that’s not my fault—”

“Oh, _sure_ ,” said Dennis scathingly. “When’s the last time you even tried it with a girl I didn’t sleep with first?”

Mac’s jaw clicked shut. He glowered at Dennis furiously.

“What is it that you’re waiting for?” Dennis pressed. “The perfect woman for you to just fall out of thin air and into your lap?”

“No,” Mac said, short and hard.

Dennis snorted.

“Tell me, Mac. Do you have some woman in mind that you’re waiting for?”

Mac looked at him guardedly.

“What do you mean?”

“Your ideal wife,” Dennis said with a little shrug. “Describe her to me.”

Mac just gaped at him. Dennis arched an eyebrow. He wasn’t going to hand Mac a ladder out of this pit. Fuck the guy, honestly. Mac floundered around for an answer for a few, painfully long moments.

“I — She…I would want her to…clean, and make me dinner and stuff—”

“That’s not a type of woman, that’s just shit you want someone to do so you don’t have to,” said Dennis, cutting a hand through the air between them to shut him up. “Are you going to come up with an actual type anytime this century or are you just planning on listing off shit that I already do for you?”

Mac just gaped at him more. Dennis stared at him hard for a long minute or so before he sighed, turning away from him and going back to scrubbing himself off in the sink. He didn’t want to have any sort of argument about Mac being gay. Not tonight and not ever.

Besides, he thought wryly. It wasn’t exactly his concern anymore.

“What’s your problem, dude?” Mac demanded, shoving at his shoulder to turn him back towards him. “Where do you get off being pissed at _me_? You kicked me out, you took my money for the strip club, and you got us thrown out of the apartment. Again, because of _your_ decision to marry some bitch you haven’t seen since high school on some pathetic little whim—”

“Oh, _pathetic_?” Dennis said with a startled little laugh. “I’m pathetic?”

“Yeah, you are!” said Mac. He pushed closer to him, eyes bright and slitted. “You’re obviously trying to fill some sad little dream that’s _long_ past—”

“I’m not the pathetic one here!” he shouted. He jabbed his finger in Mac’s chest. “You wanna talk _pathetic_ , Mac? How about you going on some big anti-gay crusade because Carmen got married to some dude who wasn’t you? _That’s_ pathetic! Or pretending like you even liked Carmen in the first place, _that’s_ what’s sad, acting like you wanted to be with her when really you just wanted her d—”

“Shut up,” Mac gritted out.

“Is that what is it?” Dennis pressed. “You want some guy to fuck you, and it was easier when it was a girl doing it so you could pretend everything was okay. Like _you_ weren’t all screwed up inside. Well, that’s really fucking sad, man.”

“You don’t even give a shit about Carmen!” Mac yelled. “Excuse me for trying to save her immortal fucking _soul_ —”

“This isn’t about her soul,” Dennis spat. “This is about you and your pathetic attempt to pretend you’re still in good with God or whatever, like you don’t get _urges_ —”

“You don’t give a shit about me and God, either,” said Mac, “and I’m not gonna explain myself to you! Let’s admit what this is really about, dude. This is about you, and being pissed the fuck off that I broke — that I stopped—”

He was doing pretty well up to there, Dennis had to admit, really steamrolling right through the insults until he started fumbling with the wording at the end there. Because, really, what did you call a breakup that wasn’t a breakup because they were never together and anyway, nothing should have even happened in the first place?

Dennis arched an eyebrow at him coldly.

“Do you really think,” he said, sounding bored, “that I’ve spared what you and me did a second thought since it ended?”

Who gave a shit that he was lying, he thought dizzily. Mac shoved him hard up against the sinks and it _hurt_ where the counter dug into his back but Mac grabbed the sides of his face and kissed him so hard that he was going to bruise, and he _liked_ it. It wasn’t even nice, it wasn’t anything at all other than them still fighting. He tipped his head back and Mac’s teeth were on his collarbone, his fingers were on Dennis’s zipper.

They didn’t talk. Mac got down on his knees and sucked him off, not the best blowjob Dennis had had recently, not even the best he’d ever had from Mac. But it was hard and unrelenting, a little _painful_ even, and Dennis came in ten minutes with his fingertips driving so hard into the counter behind him that his nails ached vaguely when he finally drew his hands away.

He bit sharply on Mac’s neck while he jerked him off, his free hand squeezing too hard at his ass while he did it. Mac rolled his hips against Dennis’s, body plastered to his, face hidden in his shoulder the whole time. Mac kissed him again when he came. Just as bruising and unhappy and unsatisfying as before.

They stood panting, collapsed side by side against the sinks, afterwards. Dennis could feel Mac shooting him glances but he resolutely stared straight ahead at the edge of one of the stalls until his blood was pumping regularly again. Mechanically, Dennis turned around to finish cleaning all the glitter off his body. Now he had to wash some jizz off too. _Great_.

Shooting him little glances, Mac followed his lead, running his rag under the tap. He swiped it over his chin, fast, but Dennis still caught it out of the corner of his eye and his chest burned. He only had to do that to wipe off his spit and Dennis’s cum. Why on earth had the same gesture lit him up from the inside out and left him grinning for an hour when they were still more than just best friends, that’s what he’d like to know. Now it just set him aching again in a vague way, in that same empty cavity where his heart should have been. It throbbed with how viscerally it felt the emptiness.

They shut off the sinks and threw down their rags, done cleaning up, but neither one of them moved for a long moment. Dennis had his hands curled over the edge of the sink again and he looked down blankly at the empty basin. Neither moved until Mac snorted softly beside him. From the corner of his eye, Dennis could see him shaking his head.

“But you never think about it,” Mac said quietly. “ _Sure_.”

Dennis swallowed. He was burning, lowly, behind the eyes.

“I hate you,” he whispered back. His voice shook, even with how low it was pitched.

He blinked a couple times, slow. Then he left Mac hanging over his own empty sink and went back out into the main bar to hunker down somewhere for the night. In the morning, he would get divorced and pretend he didn’t remember how Mac tasted more clearly than he did his own wife. Tomorrow things would go back to normal.

 

Normal was relative. Mac acted like the whole thing between them had never happened, none of it, and Dennis followed his lead. But the fact was that they were now two people who _had_ been together, acting like they hadn’t, and that was very different from never getting together at all. Dennis in early 2009 and Dennis at the end of it were two separate people, and not acknowledging what caused the shift just made things worse.

He was done fucking things up like this, he thought with a pang of something like fury rolled up with disgust. He had slipped up in more ways than he’d ever thought possible but it was okay, he reminded himself, it was _okay_ because it was never too late to set things right. Maureen hadn’t worked out, and they got divorced, but she wasn’t the last weapon in his arsenal. She wasn’t even close to a last resort. That picture of himself with the picket fence and the beautiful woman was reachable yet.

He was getting too old for this, for any of this, he thought to himself, standing at his bathroom sink. He needed to work out more. He needed to eat better, and less. He was really good at drinking and he needed to start using that to solve problems, not cause them — use it to distract him, use it to pick up girls, use it to run the bar. Never think about him and Mac, never miss the electric current that ran under his skin that half a year with him, never kiss another guy, stop eating, stop curling up on the floor and breaking mirrors and forgetting to shower for days and days and days.

Dennis splashed water over his face to scrub off the last of the soap and dabbed himself dry. He looked up and met his eye, bright-cheeked and clean, in the bathroom mirror. Distantly, he thought he looked like a total stranger. Dennis blinked hard at his reflection until he could recognize himself again, and he smiled tightly as he came back into view.

“Perfect,” he whispered. “I’m fucking perfect.”

Tomorrow didn’t mean _shit_. Tomorrow left too much room for things to go wrong in the space before it came. Tomorrow had too many unknowable variables packaged in. Tomorrow had failed him every fucking time before.

He needed to focus on today. And starting today, Dennis was going to get better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ch title from the song of the same name by the taxpayers
> 
>  [lesbianfreyja on tumblr](http://lesbianfreyja.tumblr.com/post/178708925935)


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